by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched the last film in a DVD
boxed set of five classic musicals —though I’d already had three of them in the
collection, the box was cheap enough I ordered it anyway for the two I didn’t,
the 1962 film version of The Music Man
(which I’d seen in a theatre when it was new — ya remember movie
theatres?) and the one I watched last
night, a 1964 MGM release called Viva Las Vegas starring Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret, directed by
George Sidney, produced by Jack Cummings and written by, of all people, Sally
Benson, whose collected memoirs of her childhood in St. Louis, 5135
Kensington, had inspired one of MGM’s
greatest musicals, Meet Me in St. Louis, 20 years earlier. Though there are obvious similarities between Judy
Garland and Elvis — both prestigiously talented singers who had weight
problems, abused prescription drugs to control them, and ultimately died of
overdoses in their 40’s — from Meet Me in St. Louis to Viva Las Vegas in 20 years does not sound like a desirable career trajectory to me!
Elvis buffs consider Viva Las Vegas
the last movie he made with any quality at all (aside from the concert
documentaries); though it was the biggest-grossing film of his career (outdoing
the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night,
according to Variety), after it
MGM and Paramount, the studios then sharing Elvis’s contract, decided to cut
the budgets of his films and assign the legendary “B”-meister Sam Katzman to produce them.
Viva Las
Vegas is also one of only a handful of
Elvis films for which an original soundtrack album was not issued — though the title song, which appears in the
film three times (opening credits, big production number in the middle and
closing credits), was a major hit for him — and apparently the first and only
time he ever worked with a co-star just as good at projecting sexuality on the
screen as he was. Ann-Margret was just coming off her explosive film debut in Bye,
Bye, Birdie — where she turned the title
song into an orgasmic moan — which was also directed by George Sidney, and though
apparently the still-single Elvis cruised her as energetically off-screen as
his character does on, she had little use for him. At one point during the
shoot Elvis went into one of his crying jags about how useless he thought his
life had been and how he should have stayed with the church and become a gospel
singer instead of giving his life to something as cheap and tawdry as rock ’n’
roll. Of course what Elvis was fishing for when he said things like that was
reassurance — “No, Elvis! You’re great as you are, doing what you’re doing!” —
and that’s the reaction he usually got. Ann-Margret, already known as a no-B.S.
kind of person, said, “Why not? Little Richard did it — you could do it, too.”
Elvis also accused Ann-Margret of carrying on an affair with director George
Sidney just to get herself more close-ups in the film, and the off-screen
antagonism between them carried over into the movie as well even though it made
it hard to believe the final pairing-up of the leads.
The plot, in case you
cared, revolves around the first-ever Las Vegas Grand Prix auto race — in a
number of his 1960’s films, including Spinout and Speedway, Elvis was cast as a racing driver — which turns out to be a
sports-car road race that, like Italy’s fabled Mille Miglia, was a one-lap race
held on ordinary roads, in this case starting and finishing on the Las Vegas
Strip (seeing the Strip as it stood in 1964, with all the fabled casinos that
have been torn down since to make way for even bigger and gaudier ones, is one
of the real treats of this film) and snaking through the Nevada desert, past
Hoover Dam (which appears at least twice in this film) before it returns to the
Strip. Elvis plays “Lucky” Jackson, who’s driving a rear-engined special (this
film was made at the tail end of the transition in auto racing from
front-engined to rear-engined cars but Elvis seems to be the only racer driving
a rear-engined car) and is waiting for a new motor from Los Angeles which will
supposedly make him invincible. Only the manufacturer of the motor has just one
of them in stock and he plans to sell it to the first person who comes in with
the cash. Elvis’s rival, Count Elmo Mancini (Cesare Danova, who’s so bland,
uncharismatic and utterly unskilled as an actor you wonder how he had a career
at all), is a European champion supposedly making his U.S. debut and driving a
blood-red production Ferrari GT). They both chase after Ann-Margret, who plays
Rusty Martin, the swimming instructor at the hotel where all the principals are
staying, only she can’t stand Elvis (at least at first) and the two sing a
marvelous duet in which he sings “She loves me, but she doesn’t know it yet,”
and she sings, “I loathe him, but he doesn’t know it yet.” The duet has an
important plot function: at the end of it she’s cornered him at the end of the
high-dive at the hotel’s pool and she forces him over, and in the process he
loses the bankroll he was carrying around with him in cash (which really dates this movie!) and the money flows down the
swimming-pool drain and is lost.
So Elvis and his mechanic, Shorty Farnsworth
(Nicky Blair in the sort of unfunny “comic relief” role that had been dragging
down films like this since the silent days), have to take jobs as waiters at
the hotel — though there is a
rather nice comic scene in which Elvis is the room-service waiter when Danova
is trying to romance Ann-Margret and of course disrupts it. Viva Las
Vegas is an O.K. movie, livened up
considerably by Ann-Margret’s presence — in her solos and their numbers
together she totally out-dances Elvis — but reflecting all too clearly how
bored Elvis was getting with his whole film career. The man who had once told
his friends he wanted to be the next Marlon Brando or James Dean just stands
around and looks sullen, and musically (as Charles pointed out) he sings more
soulfully in the old Italian song “Santa Lucia” than in most of the rock
numbers. About the one time we really see Elvis the rocker is in a scene in
which he covers Ray Charles’ R&B classic “What’d I Say,” and finally given a chance to do what he did best — putting a
white face on African-American music — Elvis sings and moves with real power
and authority. Then he’s back to delivering the sludge Col. Tom Parker’s house
songwriters dredged up for him. I had noticed when I got the reissue of Elvis’s
last non-live recordings from Graceland in February and October 1976 (Elvis
didn’t want to go to a recording studio so RCA Victor sent portable equipment
to Elvis’s home and they recorded first in his racquetball court, which turned
out to have too much of an echo even for Elvis, and then in his den), Way
Down in the Jungle Room, that the rockers
like “Way Down” and “Moody Blue” had a perfunctory been-there, done-that feel
but he sang with real soul and emotional force on the ballads, and that was already starting to be true here.
Had Elvis been a
different sort of artist and a different sort of person — one like Frank
Sinatra, who no matter who was formally “managing” him took control of his own
career and wouldn’t have tolerated someone like Col. Tom Parker pushing him
around — he might have turned the loss of his wife Priscilla into the occasion
for a great work of art the way Sinatra did, turning his breakup with Ava
Gardner into the album In the Wee Small Hours. Certainly those last Elvis recordings are full of
songs about lost loves with titles like “She Thinks I Still Care,” and had
Elvis been more self-aware and not had the bizarre weakness as a human being
that left him vulnerable to Parker’s old carnie tricks, he might have turned
the collapse of his marriage into an occasion for great art instead of sinking
further into lethargy and drugs. But then I’ve often written about what I call
the Elvis Perplex — how much potential talent the man had, how little of it he
actually used, and how big a star he became on just that little — and about how the
film A Face in the Crowd was the
great missed opportunity of Elvis’s career. Before Elia Kazan and Budd
Schulberg made that great story about the power of an unscrupulous celebrity
and the business structure behind him with Andy Griffith doing the performance
of his life in the lead, they had offered the part to Elvis. Had Elvis, who
admired Marlon Brando and James Dean, known that the director who had made both
Brando’s and Dean’s star-making films (A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden, respectively), wanted him for a part, he would no doubt have jumped at the
chance. Instead Col. Parker turned down the script without ever telling Elvis
it had been offered to him, and Elvis’s film career petered out into mostly
dreck, with a few bright spots along the way (Jailhouse Rock, King
Creole, Flaming Star) but nothing like what
it could have been had it started under a major director like Kazan who would
have grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and forced him to act.
