Gastrointestinal blues

Elvis Presley was TCM's Star of the Month back in July. Elvis was an actor who had some potential, but as an extremely popular singer, and thanks to probable career mismanagement from his manager, Col. Tom Parker, Elvis wound up in a bunch of formulaic fluff movies. One of the earliest movies in that formula was G.I. Blues.

Elvis, like all American young men of that era, was subject to the peacetime draft, and eventually his number was called, forcing him to waste 18 months of his life in service to the US military, which he spent mostly in Germany. (My dad also had 18 months of his life stolen, but he spent his time at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico making certain the Ernst Blofelds of the world didn't get their hands on those missiles. Anyhow, with Elvis set to be demobbed in early 1960, what better to do than make a movie that cast him as an American serviceman in Germany?

That serviceman is named Tulsa McLean, who drives a tank by day and has a musical combo with his friends and fellow servicemen Cookie (Robert Ivers) and Rick (James Douglas) by night. They try to perform at various night spots, Tulsa hoping to get enough money from this to open up a nightclub of his own once he gets back to the US.

It's in one of these clubs that Turk and the other American servicemen meet the lovely Lili (Juliet Prowse), who works at the club; and her roommate Tina (Leticia Roman). Lili is known to be notoriously hard-to-get, despite the best attempts of all the servicemen, who style themselves Lotharios, to get her. Indeed, two of the men start a bet over whether one of them can in fact spend the entire night in Lili's apartment.

Tulsa is at heart a decent guy, echoing what a lot of the people who worked with the real-life Elvis as an actor said about him. He could certainly be nice to Lili, but wouldn't really want to be part of such a wager. That is until the guy who claimed he could get Lili is transferred and Tulsa is thrust into the role.

Meanwhile, Cookie gets involved with Lili's roommate, while Rick is looking for a girl he used to know, whose landlady insists moved without leaving a forwarding address. The reason that third woman doesn't want to see Rick is because she thought Rick was engaged to a woman back home, but along the way got her pregnant, leaving her a single mother.

As you can guess, Lili learns of the wager and it threatens to screw up their friendship, although this being an Elvis Presley movie, everything will turn out right in the end because Tom Parker presumably thought audiences didn't want to see Elvis in anything dark. Along the way, Elvis sings several songs that I don't think became much in the way of hits. One exception was a reworking of an old German song called "Muß ich denn zum Städtele hinaus" (Must I leave for the city), which with English lyrics was called "Wooden Heart". Except that this wasn't a hit for Elvis, but Joe Dowell.

G.I. Blues is undemanding entertainment from Elvis Presley. It's competent but nothing spectacular. But I think it shows just why Elvis was such a hit with the fans.