by Peter Tewksbury, 1969.
Starring Elvis Presley.
Rating: 10/10, 3/10.
Yes, there were more people than just Elvis in The Trouble With Girls. It is not, however, the kind of movie where I pay attention to people’s names, and after much frustrated trying to figure out who played what and who did what when and why I gave up. Elvis was in it. So was Vincent Price, but he was there for really no reason. I mean, he was there for a reason, but it was so ridiculously contrived that it’s odd that they didn’t make anything of it. Anyway, he was hardly in the movie for five minutes, so let’s stop talking about him.
OK. I’m utterly at a loss for what to say about The Trouble With Girls. This review has just been sitting here for weeks (OK, eleven days now) and I’ve been staring at it apprehensively, trying desperately to come up with something intelligent to say. But the reviews are piling up behind it, and I must get down to business.
But what can I say? If I had myself an education like Greil Marcus, maybe I could come up with something like he says in his fabulous fabulous book "Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The 20th Century," which is this:
"The films were so shoddy, I thought, they seemed to embody a whole new kind of cinema: the 1960 G.I. Blues was my example. 'When Elvis strums his acoustic guitar,' I said, 'an electric solo comes out. When bass and guitar are seen backing him, you hear horns and piano. When he sings, the soundtrack is at least half a verse out of synch.... Someday, French film critics will discover these pictures and hail them as unique examples of cinéma discrépant. There will be retrospectives at the Cinémathèque, and not long after Elvis movies will be shown on U.S. public television, complete with learned documentary deferring to the French discovery and bemoaning America's inability to appreciate its own culture..."
Of course, I’m no Greil Marcus (but who is?) and besides, even though I read Lipstick Traces (as should everyone), I read it long enough ago that I’m not entirely sure what cinéma discrépant is anymore. Additionally, I’m sure you can all tell that I only bring up Greil Marcus to shamelessly fill space. It’s not even G.I. Blues that I saw.
But I do have to say, Mr. Marcus has himself a point (he usually does). According to Videohound’s Golden Movie Retriever, the movie guide Matthew swears by (or, OK, uses...or at least owns), The Trouble With Girls is the best of the Elvis movies, the one with the most attention to detail. If that’s the case, then the other ones were in serious trouble. What we have here is an incoherent mess of a movie. Random events that have no effect on anything are built up like they’re going to be the most important thing since the Book of Genesis (I’m thinking here of the fireworks, specifically), while significant events just sort of happen with a minimum of fuss. Characters will be established and then vanish for great lengths of time (this happened to every major character, without exception—including, oddly, Elvis himself). As Matthew pointed out, it seems like they filmed the movie and then thought, "Oh yeah! We didn’t give Elvis a chance to sing anything!" and quickly contrived a silly excuse to get in a song or two near the end.
All of which, of course, combines to make for a hideously entertaining movie watching experience. I haven’t even mentioned the Olympic swimmer, who is only in the movie to find the body (did I mention that this is a "mystery"?), but is so unnecessarily odd with her weird stretches and way of speaking and rambling on and on about goose fat grease or something. And Vincent Price’s Mr. Morality was great. In fact, all of the characters who are there for no reason (the college boys, the weird bluegrass band...there’s a lot of them) are very funny. Oh, and the best part of the whole thing? Let me put it this way. If anyone can e-mail me with a reason, any valid reason, that this movie is called "The Trouble With Girls," I will send them a present.
Commentary rolls off The Trouble With Girls’s back the way water rolls off of a duck’s. Some things (The Seventh Seal, Keats, some quiches) are beyond me because they’re too dense. The Trouble With Girls is beyond me...well, it’s beyond me because it fails to work on such a fundamental level that it almost seems beyond mortal ken. But just like The Seventh Seal, Keats, and those quiches, the reward more than justifies the effort and frustration.