(1965/MGM) DVD / VHS
Rave Reviews
“One can see why the younger members of the audience were apt to snigger.” —Eric Braun, The Elvis Film Encyclopedia
“With the ripest dialogue this side of What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the movie offers one delirious interlude after another.”
—Marshall Crenshaw, Hollywood Rock
“This is close to bottom of the barrel as far as Elvis movies are concerned.”
—The Elvis Movie Database (Web site)
Plot, What Plot? Trying to pick Elvis’s best bad movie may, at first, seem like a fool’s errand. After all, the man himself as much as admitted he made the same movie thirty-three times. The scary part is just how successful the Elvis movie formula was. Most people no longer remember that Presley was actually listed on the annual Top Ten Money-Making Stars Poll seven times between 1957 and 1966.
The formula was a simple and efficient one, set in cement after 1960’s Blue Hawaii became the King’s biggest box-office hit: Take Presley and one or more pretty female costars, put them in an exotic location and/or situation, then ladle eight or more songs over the top so Colonel Parker could get a tie-in soundtrack album out of each film.
The problem was that churning out about three feature-length efforts a year soon caused even Elvis himself to tire of doing these films. With titles like Tickle Me, Girl Happy, and The Trouble with Girls (And How to Get into It), they were essentially innocuous imitations of one another, produced on ultra-low budgets and returning multimillion-dollar profits (most of which went directly into Parker’s pocket). But by 1965, with the Beatles having replaced him as the world’s most popular rock stars and his box-office status slipping, Presley abandoned even feigned interest in what he was doing—and it showed.
Shoddy even by the low standards of an Elvis film, Harum Scarum is easily the dumbest title among the King’s three dozen Hollywood movies. This time Elvis plays an American movie star named Johnny Tyronne, who’s kidnapped during a publicity tour for his latest movie and told he must kill a king to regain his freedom. It all takes place in the Middle Eastern nation of Lunarkand, located somewhere on the MGM backlot and littered with sets, props, and costumes cadged from previous pictures like Kismet and Lady of the Tropics. It includes the requisite nine songs, three of which are tossed off in the first seven minutes, and not one of which anyone but an Elvis fan would even claim to remember. One of them has a creepy Michael Jackson quality, as Presley sings a love song to a hip-jiggling, come-hither dance by a ten-year-old would-be slave girl.
Besides its borrowed props, the sets are also adorned with dozens of scantily clad harem girls lounging in the background, bopping bad guys with clay pots or joining Elvis to perform numbers like “Shake That Tambourine”(wonder what that could mean?). Presley’s costar here is 1959’s Miss America, Mary Ann Mobley, as an Arab princess with Anglo features, a never-explained Mississippi accent, and even more mascara than Elvis himself appears to be wearing. And, just for good measure, Billy Barty is thrown in for comic relief, as a midget thief who doubles as a court jester.
A jumbled mess that proved one of the most embarrassing films in one of the most embarrassing film careers in Hollywood history, Harum Scarum didn’t even manage to turn the usual profit a 1965 Elvis title should have. But at least it came out before the Razzies existed … otherwise, it might have swept our 1965 Worst Achievement dis-honors.
Loopy Lyrics
Johnny Tyronne (Elvis Presley), singing the closing number in a Las Vegas casino, surrounded by harem girls: “If Romeo had a harem holiday, you can bet that Juliet would have never been his girl forever …”
Fun Footnote
An MGM executive once said about Elvis movies, “They don’t need titles. They could be numbered.”