Friday, October 26, 2007

Movie review - Elvis #14 - "Kissin' Cousins" (1964) **1/2

The one where Elvis plays a double role - an army officer and a hill billy relative. This was produced by notorious cheapskate Sam Katzman (indicating the Colonel was more interested in short term profits than in prolonging Elvis' career by associating him with the best talent), but is actually a lot of fun - the double role thing works (the two Elvises even fight with one another), the star is having a high old time, totally at home with this sort of cracker humour, the script is fairly packed with jokes and yokels and innuendoes about horny hillbilly girls: for a time its implied Elvis is having a comfortable ménage a trois with two cute girls (he even sings a song about being unable to make up his mind between them, kissing them both - eventually he settles for Yvonne Craig) and there are a pack of women called the kitty hawks who run around like bitches on heat and just wanted to be serviced.

The 60s was the golden age of hillbilly comedy - CBS based its ratings dominance on such shows as Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies and Petticoat Junction - and Elvis made his own contribution to the genre with this and Follow That Dream. Arthur O'Connell, another hillbilly staple (he played a paterfamilias in Hound Dog Man and April Love), turns up here. In the final number, check out how gay the dancing male soldiers look.

The jokes are obvious, the tunes average, and you wish there was a bit more story (it seems mostly to consist of people running around and Elvis trying to get O'Connell to OK construction of a missile base by buying the women folk nice things) but its bright and utterly lacking in pretension, Elvis is having fun and the motto of "get the most out of life" (as espoused by O'Connell and which results in the finale) is still pertinent. (Indeed they could have made a bit more of this - say, have Elvis' army character as an uptight person who learns to loosen up by being around hillbillies).

NB one of Elvis' numbers is done with him driving a vehicle while someone sits next to him listening - this happened a lot in Elvis movies (off the top of my head I can think of times in Wild in the Country and Blue Hawaii). What sort of direction did the actors get? "Just sit there and listen."

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