January 8 is the birth anniversary of Elvis Presley, that famous singer who appeared in some 30 films although whether you want to call a lot of it acting depends on your opinion of Col. Tom Parker, I suppose. TCM likes to honor Elvis either on his birthday or on the anniversary of his death in August during Summer Under the Stars, but this year TCM doesn't seem to have any Elvis planned. I happen to have two of his movies on my DVR, so I decided to fire up one of them and watch it to do a post in conjunction with Elvis' birthday. That film is Girls! Girls! Girls!.
Elvis sings the title song over scenes of a fishing boat. That's because Elvis' character, Ross Carpenter, works in Hawaii as the captain of one of those charter fishing boats taking wealthy tourists out to try to catch a big fish. Ross works for a Greek-American couple who were partners with Ross' late father, and one of the boats they now own, the Westwind, was built by Ross and his father. Indeed, Ross still lives on it. But unfortunately, the husband of the couple has some health issues that require his moving to a drier climate. So he's retiring and selling the business to move to Arizona. He'd be happy to sell Ross the Westwing, but Ross doesn't have the money.
Ross goes to the local nightclub to commiserate with the people there on his troubles. He's friends with the club's singer, Robin (Stella Stevens), and sometimes he even goes up on stage to sing himself, since this is after all an Elvis vehicle. And the proprietor thinks Ross would make a good attraction at the club, but since we need dramatic conflict at the club, Ross insists that he's a sailor through and through.
Also at the club is Laurel Dodge (Laurel Goodwin), who's new to Hawaii and as we first see her getting into an argument with what looks like a boyfriend. She leaves the club with Ross, now definitely being sans boyfriend, and as Laurel and Ross talk, the quickly become friends on the way to being in love with each other. Except that all of this happens in the first third of the movie, so you know there still has to be more romantic conflict until Laurel and Ross wind up together in the final reel.
Part of that romantic conflict comes from Robin, who may or may not be more than just a friend to Ross. But then Laurel does something to make a mess of things. We learn that she comes from a wealthy family in the contiguous 48. Wealthy enough, in fact, that she can phone home and ask for an advance on the money she gets from the family trust or whatever it is. She uses it to buy the Westwind so that Ross can keep it, but this only pisses off Ross because he wanted to do things independently.
Sure, we eventually get to a happy ending, and Elvis gets to sing quite a few songs along the way, again unsurprising since it's an Elvis Presley movie. The best known of the songs is "Return to Sender", although there's also "Earth Boy" that Elvis sings with a pair of Asian-American girls, an a couple of songs for Stella Stevens to sing.
As for the main story, well, it's serviceable but not particularly great, thanks as always to Col. Tom Parker, who didn't want to "ruin" Elvis' reputation by stretching him far enough that the audience might not like something so radically different. Instead, he "ruined" Elvis by typecasting him, which is a shame, because Elvis could have been a more than capable actor given good material. Everybody else is adequate too, but you get the feeling they all could have handled a more challenging script.
Girls! Girls! Girls! isn't bad, but it's another of those movies that could have been so much more.
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