Ever hear someone unfamiliar with Shakespeare complain, after seeing Hamlet for the first time, that’s it’s full of clichés? That’s how I feel watching Elvis Presley movies. Elvis isn’t a person anymore — he’s a cliché — a supericonic hunka hunka burnin’ mannerisms. The sneer. The hips. The unnaturally shiny blue-black hair. He’s like a special effect, digitally created by Industrial Light and Magic and dropped into a hackneyed old B-movie. He’s a real-life Jar Jar Binks.
The year is 1964, but it’s still the ’50s. Charlie Rogers (Presley) is a wandering troubadour, a folk singer who’s constantly getting fired from gigs like one at Mother’s Tea House, a beat-y kind of joint, where he caused some trouble with silver-spoon college-boy patrons (“so loaded with cash / they give me a rash” Elvis — I mean, Charlie — sings in “Poison Ivy League”). So he hits the open road. He is the wind, baby.
But an accident that trashes his motorcycle lands Charlie amidst Maggie Morgan’s (Barbara Stanwyck!) traveling carnival, and while he waits a plot-convenient week for his bike to be repaired, he takes a job as a roustabout at the carnival. Charlie’s kept pretty busy, what with all those girls to woo and carny slang to learn.
Carnies: they’re the folks that freak out Austin Powers (“Smell like cabbage. Small hands.”), which is probably why my brain keeps intersecting Roustabout with Tod Browning’s circus classic, Freaks. Is Roustabout the movie with the midgets and the pinheads? No, this isn’t the shadowy black-and-white one — this is the superbright Technicolor one in which the CGI Elvis gets slapped by a lot by girls with frighteningly waspish waists. This is the one in which he’s a “fresh punk” to the older generation, but the kids sure do like his singing and, gee, d’ya think he might be able to pull poor Maggie’s carnival back from the brink of bankruptcy?
Charlie’s such a nice soft bad boy, with his reassuringly nonthreatening Japanese motorcycle and neatly pressed clothes. Sure, he cheeses off carnival comanager Joe Lean (Leif Erickson) by romancing his daughter, Cathy (Joan Freeman), sneaking rides on the Ferris wheel with her — the scamp — but that’s only because Joe has a nasty chip on shoulder that has nothing to do with Charlie… one that Charlie, surely, will help him get over. And Charlie sings those corny carny songs right out there on the midway, ones with lines like “popcorn, peanuts, cotton candy / pink lemonade that’s dan-dan-dandy.” That’s the kind of ballyhoo that really gets the marks spending.
Get past the cheerful misogyny of Roustabout — the “girlie show” on the midway, the guy playing the “Dunk the Girl” midway game who proclaims “I’m gonna give that broad a bash she ain’t never gonna forget,” and Charlie’s own casual two-timing of the woman we’re supposed to believe he’s just plain crazy about — and, well, there’s not much else left. Silly movie. But that’s pretty much what Elvis flicks are about.
This review originally appeared at the now-defunct Apollo Guide.
