• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Joe Esposito blames it on Elvis’s military experience and his renewed respect for authority.

“The army calmed him down, but it hurt him more than it helped him, because it tamed him too much. When he came out, he became more oriented to do what he was told. And because of his upbringing, he could never stand up to a person who was older than he was. He could scream and yell and chew us out, but he was taught to always respect his elders. That hurt him in his career. He should have said, ‘This is what I want to do. Let’s try it, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll understand.’ That’s why he made so many mediocre movies.”

He particularly put too much trust in director Taurog, Joan thought, as well as other directors down the line. Had he gone along with some of his own instincts, “He might have done some different kind[s] of films.”

Blue Hawaii, Elvis’s first bikini picture, followed the musical format of G.I. Blues—fourteen songs in all, three more than even its model. But it easily surpassed it at the box office, and quickly recouped its $2 million budget. In placing Elvis in an exotic locale, and wedding a plethora of romance to nonstop music—the film’s biggest hit, “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” fell just short of number one, and the soundtrack topped the charts, selling two million copies in the first year alone—Wallis had perfected his winning Presley formula. The popularity of Blue Hawaii doomed Elvis’s chances of ever returning to serious dramatic fare, and only rarely did he even attempt to venture beyond the film’s stifling structure.

Nearly all the Elvis movies produced after the release of Blue Hawaii would be assembled around his personality—or Hollywood’s conception of it—just as films had once been fashioned around such female stars as Mae West and Shirley Temple. The Wallis productions were the last Hollywood vehicles guaranteed to pull a reliable gross solely because of their star. This led the producer himself to remark, “A Presley picture is the only sure thing in show business.”

Elvis’s next film, Follow That Dream, for United Artists, also sent him to a sunny clime, this time to Crystal River, Florida. Based on Richard Powell’s novel Pioneer, Go Home, and produced by David Weisbart (Love Me Tender), the film attempted to meld comedy and social satire. But in failing to capture the humor of rural southerners, director Gordon Douglas ended up with something akin to a “Li’l Abner” cartoon, an embarrassing mishmash of a movie about a blended family, welfare, and homesteading.

Still, there were highlights. “Elvis was really good in that film,” in the estimation of his costar, Anne Helm. “I thought he was a wonderful actor. He had a scene where we were in a courtroom, and they had hired all the townspeople to be extras. . . . He turned to them and gave a very emotional speech about why the children should not be taken away from us. He was so believable that he had the townspeople in tears. It was interesting to see, because I had never thought about him as an actor.”

When Elvis learned that he would be spending nearly three weeks in Florida, he sent word to Jackie Rowland, his Jacksonville sweetheart, asking her to come to him. She was nineteen now, but her mother still frowned on her friendship with Elvis and had refused Gladys’s invitation to visit Graceland. Now Marguerite waffled on whether she would let her daughter go to Crystal River. (“You will go when I will take you.”) By the time they finally arrived, says Jackie, “Elvis had gone, and left a message that he couldn’t wait for me any longer. I knew at that point that it was a hopeless cause for the two of us.” Never again would she receive an invitation from him, though he would have RCA send her albums into the 1970s.

Elvis had his hands full of women in Crystal River as it was. He was romancing both of his costars, the voluptuous, Toronto-born Helm and the southern beauty Joanna Moore.

Of the two, he had an easier time with the down-to-earth Helm, whom he allowed to “become one of the