Post by ronnierocketago on Feb 15, 2010 5:54:22 GMT
HARUM SCARUM (1965) - **1/2
Maybe I've failed my southern roots, but I've only seen two Elvis Presley movies. Obviously one of them is JAILHOUSE ROCK. A genuine rock n roll cinema classic with Elvis adequately parlaying his flaunting sexual charisma and scandalous swinging hips as an antihero convict-turned-rock star. A suiting youthsploitation vehicle for this rebel released at the right time with the birth of the Teenage Culture. Then Elvis got drafted by the Army, which John Lennon said it best: "They castrated him."[/i]
Now less risque and more mainstream sterile friendly for commercial consumption, safe Elvis would become "The King" with endless TV specials, uninspired records, and of course endless formulaic B-movies. From my understanding, these pictures were all basically the same: Elvis gets into some sort of drivel plot, gets the girl, and sings a few songs along the way. So yeah why bother with more Elvis movies when life is way too short? That said, I am sorta intrigued with his obscure supposed "serious" western CHARRO!, which was partly funded in the same contract which gave us his '68 Comeback Special.
Somehow I DVRed HARUM SCARUM from TCM and forgot all about it, so now is as good as any time to check out a random slice of the Elvis filmography which some fans consider to be his worst. Shit even the movie guide of the Razzies (the Oscars for bad movies) listed this as among their 100 most "enjoyable" bad films. HARUM SCARUM isn't either bad or enjoyable, it's just so flakey of a non-existent movie that if not for Elvis, this would be the first invisible picture in history.
I'm understating when I say that everyone in HARUM SCARUM is absolutely stupid. Some Arab assassins kidnap movie star Elvis with the plan to make him murder some local Sheik. Now why do they think he is suitable? Because these guys saw Elvis' new movie where he's some swashbuckler-type adventure hero. What makes this idiotcy even more pathetic is thes assassins are represented as this ancient evil bloodthirsty order which by the mere mention of their name scares the shit out of everybody. Fuck these guys are more incompent than Stormtroopers, Red Shirts, Cobra, and the French military combined.
Or how about when Elvis gets help escaping from his predictament with some shady conman, who gives our hero exposition of how they're in a kingdom "totally isolated" from the rest of the world for the last 2000 years. Then the next scene, Elvis pays him $10,000 in American bills to get him out. What good is that foreign unrecognized currency going to be for this guy inside the borders besides colorful toilet paper? When did Elvis become an expert in war strategy to give advice to the "elite" military? Or my favorite, Elvis falling into some Princess's private courtyard and despite her equisite royal gown, jewelry, educated and trained in proper protocol while also easily scoring horses from the royal stables....he accepts blindly her lie that she's only a servant girl. Uhuh.
Also I like how Elvis repeatedly falls into or hides within water, yet his hair is unmoved. Now that's some real awesome perm juice there King.
Look even the title is dumb. A moronic pun on Harem and Scare'Em (I guess?) and even then it doesn't make any sense. What guy gets scared of a harem? And the fuck exactly is a "Scarum" anyway? It's one of those meaningless nonsensical titles that a producer came up with on the fly and built everything around it.
In some ways I hate bashing something like HARUM SCARUM because what's the point? The filmmakers only had the basic ambitions of purposely making a simple, inoffensive, bland and rather disposable low budget product involving sword fights, fist fighting, jail escape, midgets, cute orphaned kids, dumb pretty bimbos, and of course Elvis. And for the most part, I suppose they succeeded. I can't say I hated the movie, but that should never be a strong compliment. The only good thing I can say about HARUM SCARUM is Elvis. I think we can forget somehows how dynamic goodwill his presence buys us with such trash, I mean if a redneck musician/actor was the one to save a kingdom from a dastardly foreign oil conspiracy....why not? His best scenes in HARUM are him singing. The tunes are tottally forgettable, but we don't mind.
It's really depressing how Elvis had such an awesome aura that he could survive something so dumb and forgettable. I read these anecdotes of how Elvis hated these movies. He wanted to be taken seriously as an actor and make substantive films. But MGM wouldn't let him, and in the process you have a movie with the Middle East depicted as never escaping the Middle Ages with filthy peasants, horse-drawn carriages, all that shit. This I would have expected from a 30s/40s movie (like THIEF OF BAGHDAD) but that was depicted as the past and HARUM SCARUM is 1965, recylcing sets and props from the 1930s.
A real stark difference with around the same time the Beatles were making their well-made witty movies A HARD DAY'S NIGHT and HELP! (also in 1965), which raised the audience and critics' expectations high for a "rock" movie and HARUM SCARUM is the antithesis, totally detached from reality, a bizarre holdover from a decade earlier. Also did you know Elvis turned down the Jon Voight part in MIDNIGHT COWBOY and his egotistical demand for top billing cost him Barbara Streisand's A STAR IS BORN? Bad moves King.
All in all, about what I expected.