Our film do doth open with a narrator, who informs Charles Lindbergh just crossed the Atlantic all by himself, how Babe Ruth was threatening to hit sixty home-runs, and why folks were openly wondering if Calvin Coolidge would run for a second term, which makes this, I believe, somewhere around 1927 or thereabouts.
Regardless, those are concerns for another time, Mr. Omniscient observes, because today, the Chautauqua is rolling into town as we cut to the train station in Bradford Center, Iowa, where a throng of very excited people have gathered to greet the latest arrival.
What's a Chautauqua? Glad you asked. A Chautauqua was kinda like a traveling circus -- only without the clowns, trapeze artists, or animal acts. Okay, that's not really fair; it's more of a revival meeting meets a renaissance festival by way of a temperance rally with forums, symposiums and speakers on all matters of subjects, topped off with several musical revues.
Now, while this particular roadshow has been around before, the operation is now under new management; namely Walter Hale (Presley), the son of the former owner, who is under the constant watchful tut-tut tutelage of the fussy Johnny (Andrews), his late father’s right hand man. And their train has barely stopped before trouble starts brewing.
Seems the City Fathers are already haggling over the attraction's guaranteed payment, with the main point of contention being with Mayor Gilchrist (Zuckert), who wants a solemn pledge that his daughter will get the lead in the Chautauqua's annual children's pageant to help grease the wheels.
After assuring his Honor that shouldn’t be a problem, an impromptu parade erupts and Hale, playing the Pied Piper, leads the march from the train station to the fairgrounds.
Along the way, Hale spots a couple of loitering youngsters, Carol and Willy (Jones, Brown), and gives them each a silver dollar and a couple of free passes to the fair, much to the delight of Carol's mother, Nita Bix (North).
Then, the music swells and the credits roll, where we suddenly realize that our leading man isn't singing. Strange. And weird. Strangely weird.
Later, as the Chautauqua gets into full swing with a lecture on cannibalism in one tent and a serenading madrigal in another, in the children's tent, a besieged Charlene (Mason) auditions a bunch of young rowdies for that all important children's pageant.
After several kids take their turn -- including quick glimpses of Danny Bonaduce (alias Danny Partridge) hamming it up as a one man band, and Susan Olson (alias Cindy Brady) singing her guts out -- Carol and Willy perform a duet that wins Carol the coveted lead, who is decidedly NOT the mayor’s daughter.
When all hell breaks loose with this announcement, Charlene seeks out the boss and catches Hale arguing with his barker, Clarence (Teague), who has the most punchable face I have ever seen, about riling up the locals with some unsanctioned gambling behind the main tent.
Interjecting, and demanding more help to keep all those bratty kids in line or she'll quit on the spot, all Charlene gets from Hale is an assist from the show’s equivalent to Chuck Jones’ Dover Boys (1942), a bumbling quartet of sweater clad Ivy leaguers (O’Neal, Welker, Rubenstein, Briles), which results in her leaving in a snitty, thanks-for-nothing huff.
But once that fire is seemingly out, Johnny says they've got even more trouble brewing; and to avoid it, Hale must convince the hot-headed Charlene to give young Carol the boot to make way for the Mayor's daughter or they'll lose their guaranteed money.
Thus and so, with our internal conflict set, Hale promises to start negotiations right away with the fiery flapper, who, if her boss was on fire, might offer him a lit match...
While serving as President of these United States, Theodore Roosevelt was quoted in The Assembly Herald (August 11, 1905), calling the Chautauqua phenomenon “a source of positive strength and refreshment of mind and body -- a gathering that is typically American in that it is typical of America at its best.”
A relic of a bygone age, the Chautauqua was a populist movement whose endgame was to enlighten, educate and stump for social reform to the masses, which “brought entertainment and culture to a whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, showmen, preachers, and specialists of the day.”
The Frankfurt Index (July 17, 1918).
These shows hit the road around 1904 and would reach their peak in popularity in the 1920s, where 21 different shows provided programs for more than 10,000 communities in 45 States to an estimated 40 million people before the Great Depression and mass communication through radio broadcasts kinda derailed things.
But until then, “The Chautauqua circuit brought entertainment and culture to rural America,” said Bob Freund (The Fort Lauderdale News, September 11, 1964), “with personalities ranging from William Jennings Bryan to John Phillip Sousa to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.” Or as Gay McLaren put it, at the time, the Chautauqua circuit “was the greatest aggregation of public performers the world has ever known."
The Grand Island Independent (October 7, 1922).
An impressionist and an entertainer, McLaren was a star attraction on the circuit with her one woman show: The Girl with the Camera Mind, where she would recite an entire play from memory, playing all the characters herself. And in 1938, she published a diary-like account of her time on the road, which first saw print in The Atlantic (April thru May, 1938) before being collected in the book Morally We Roll Along (-- often misremembered or misquoted as the old Kaufman and Hart song, "Merrily We Roll Along," which was also the theme for the animated Merry Melodies shorts).
Around 1944, producer Sol C. Siegel would option her story for Columbia, hoping to turn it into a biopic / musical showcase on the life and times of the old Chautauqua circuit. But the film would not get made as Siegel would move on to 20th Century Fox, where he produced A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), and then shifted to MGM, where he produced High Society (1956), a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story (1940).
And with this impressive string of hits, by 1958, Siegel was appointed head of studio operations at MGM, a post he would serve for the next three years. And during his tenure, the studio would produce such blockbuster hits as Ben-Hur (1959), Cimarron (1960), and How the West Was Won (1962).
Meantime, Siegel also tried to resurrect his Chautauqua project, assigning the production to Edmund Grainger, who at the time was mostly known for working with John Wayne on films like Flying Tigers (1942), Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Flying Leathernecks (1951), and more recently, Glenn Ford, with The Sheepman (1958) and Torpedo Run (1958).
Sol C. Siegel.
Here, we can assume that McLaren’s tale was still tied up with Columbia, and so, in June, 1959, it was announced that Don Mankiewicz would write a fresh screenplay based on an as of yet unpublished novel about the circuit by Day Keene and Dwight Babcock.
In her column for October 20, 1960 (Chicago Tribune), Hedda Hopper announced MGM had pegged Ford to star in their new film Chautauqua, with production set to begin once Ford wrapped up filming on Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961) and Vincente Minnelli’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962). And on October 25, Hopper stated that Grainger wanted singer / actress Julie London to play “the small town hell-raiser who joins the tent show,” and how Grainger was now trying to fit the puzzle pieces of her tour dates together with Glenn Ford’s film commitments.
Others locked into the cast were Hope Lang and Arthur O’Connell, and there were rumors that Elvis Presley was considered to co-star in the picture, too. I traced this rumor back to Fred Worth’s Elvis: His Life from A to Z (1988) but could find no further corroboration. (Again, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.) Presley was discharged from the army in March of 1960, and went into production almost immediately on G.I. Blues (1960) and then Flaming Star (1960).
Regardless of the rumors, when you compare the superior box-office take of G.I. Blues, a true Presley vehicle, to the lesser take of Flaming Star, where Presley was part of an ensemble, it’s doubtful that Presley’s ever-meddling Svengali, Colonel Tom Parker, would’ve allowed his client to play second fiddle to Ford (or anyone) at that point.
But it was all theoretical anyway because, despite all the casting news and gossip, as far as I can tell, MGM’s version of Chautauqua went no further than that and the plug was pulled indefinitely after a string of high-budget features failed to ignite at the box-office for MGM, leading to a decades long drought for the once storied studio.
Meanwhile, after that string of disappointments, Siegel left MGM in 1964 and formed his own independent film company, Sol C. Siegel Productions. Siegel would then sign an exclusive deal with Mike Frankovich at Columbia for distribution. And with this deal, Siegel was able to dust off that old script based on MacLaren’s book, resurrecting Chautauqua once again -- though it would prove just as ill-fated.
In August, 1964, Hopper reported that Siegel had lunch with Dick Van Dyke, who was just coming off the smash hits Bye Bye Birdie (1963) and Mary Poppins (1964); and according to Siegel, he “flipped over the idea.” So Van Dyke was on board, and Siegel next set his sights on signing Julie Andrews to co-star. “It’s good Americana,” Siegel told Hopper about the production (Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1964). “And there’s so much entertainment in it my problem will be keeping it down to a basic story.”
Siegel had big plans for Chautauqua, “which would trace the development of this unique institution that has never been fully explored on screen.” Later that year, he would tab Charles Walters as his director, who had worked with Siegel on High Society, Gigi (1958) and Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960). As Siegel told Hopper, “it will be one of the most important productions of recent times” and how it would be photographed on the same big scale as How the West Was One, a star-studded blockbuster that was shot in Cinerama.
But Siegel would also point out that, once again, he would have to wait at least six months before he could go into production, having to wait until The Dick Van Dyke Show went on hiatus in March, 1965. Said an optimistic Siegel, “By that time I’ll be ready.”
Only he wasn’t, as the project was deemed too expensive and shelved once more. However, a few years later, back at MGM, the studio was in desperate need of a contractually obligated vehicle for Presley.
Once a genre all by himself, producer Hal Wallis, who helmed nine of Presley’s features, once proclaimed: "An Elvis Presley picture is the only sure thing in Hollywood." But by 1968, things had changed considerably.
Presley and Wallis had come to loggerheads over some comments the producer had made during the production of Roustabout (1964), where his star felt like he was thrown under the bus. In rebuttal, Presley said he was tired of the producer winning Academy Awards with his prestige films like Beckett (1964) on the back of the money made by his schlocky second-tier films.
Hollywood had learned its lesson: do the Presley pictures quick and cheap and move on to the next one because his audience would show up, no matter what. But Presley was nowhere near the box office draw that he used to be as this model ground itself up in its own gears after a string of stinkers. So much so MGM was glad to finish off their bloated contract with Presley and Parker, who were owed an upfront salary of $850,000 plus 50-percent of the box-office, and finally free themselves of a lame duck attraction and the odiferous Parker.
“MGM had exhibited no interest whatsoever in writing a new contract with a star they had done business with for 11 years now,” observed Peter Gurlanick in his book, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (1999). “And the Colonel had no interest in entertaining offers from a position of weakness rather than strength.”
The Los Angeles Citizen News (October 19, 1968).
It was a tumultuous period for Presley. His film career was in tatters, and his music career wasn’t faring much better. Of the eight Presley singles released between January, 1967, and May, 1968, only two had charted in the top 40, and none higher than number 28.
On the plus side, he and his wife, Priscilla, welcomed their first (and only) child, Lisa Marie, in January (1968). And soon to be a free agent, as Parker shopped his client around, his manager finally found a cautious taker at Universal, who agreed to pay them $1.25 million for one feature film and one TV Christmas special for NBC sponsored by Singer, who mainly manufactured sewing machines.
As Gurlanick laid it out, “There was little hope now that anything was going to break before the TV special aired in December. Speedway (1968), released in May, had barely made back its negative cost, and Live a Little Love a Little (1968), which came out in October, did even worse. The soundtrack album for Speedway had been a disaster, the single release from Live a Little, Love a Little sold well-under two hundred thousand, and the title song from Stay Away, Joe (1968) had not even merited release as an A-side.”
Those familiar with your Elvis lore are keenly aware that this proposed Christmas Special quickly changed course once producer Steve Binder got involved, who had worked on The T.A.M.I. Show (1964), a live musical blowout with an amazing line-up that featured, among others, the Beach Boys, James Brown, and the Rolling Stones. He’d also worked on Hullabaloo (8 episodes) and heralded a similar showcase special for Petula Clark, which aired in April, 1968.
This special caused some controversy due to several sponsors objecting to a duet between Clark and Harry Belafonte, who demanded an alternate take because Clark had merely touched Belafonte’s arm, which is all you need to know about the state of race relations at the time. But Clark refused and conspired with Binder to destroy the rest of the footage, forcing the network to broadcast the show as is.
For Presley, under Binder’s stewardship, the Christmas themes were quickly whittled away. And he managed a brilliant end-run around Parker’s constant meddling and doom-saying and returned Presley to his roots: performing before a live audience.
One of the biggest coups Binder managed for the special was to deck out Presley in a black leather jumpsuit, reunited him with his former bandmates Scottie Moore and DJ Fontana (-- sadly, Bill Black had passed away in October, 1965), put him on a small stage, and let him jam for an appreciative studio audience.
“I’ve already taped that [special] for December,” Presley told Vernon Scott (The Solano-Napa News Chronicle, September 27, 1968). “And let me tell you my knees were shaking. It had been just too long since I’d appeared before a live audience. [But] after a while I began to relax and enjoy myself.”
Scott caught up with Presley while he was filming Charro! (1969), a western, and a rare non-musical role for the actor. “Elvis stacks up with the best of them,” commented the film's director, Charles Warren. “And I’ve directed Gary Cooper, Bill Holden, Gregory Peck -- all of them. I love Elvis because he takes direction well and tries hard to bring a little something extra to his characterization. Furthermore, he has more enthusiasm than anyone I’ve worked with, and he saves it for the camera.”
Despite the praise, Presley admitted “it was getting harder and harder to perform to a movie camera. The inspiration wasn’t there.” But taping the special with Binder in June seemed to have invigorated Presley, and to keep that buzz going Presley was ready to hit the road for the first time in over a decade. His last tour ended back in November, 1957, and the last time he performed live was in March, 1961.
The Cincinnati Post (December 3, 1968).
“Before too long I’m going to make some personal appearance tours,” said Presley. “I’m looking forward to a tour or two and seeing the people from a stage again. I’ll probably start out here in this country and after that play some concerts abroad, starting in Europe. I want to see some places I’ve never seen before. I miss the personal contact with audiences.”
Still, Presley hadn’t quite given up on acting just yet either, telling Scott, “I’d like to [keep making] movies, some of them musicals or comedies, some of them straight dramatic stories. I’d like to continue recording, and I’m looking forward to making these personal appearance tours.”
The Lancaster News Era (December 3, 1968).
The problem was, on the acting front, he could find no takers thanks to Parker’s exorbitant salary demands. Thus, at the time, Presley only had two more films on the slate, Chautauqua for MGM and the yet to be determined film for Universal. The TV special -- which came to be retroactively known as the ‘68 Comeback Special (originally advertised as just Elvis) -- was set to air on December 3, 1968, and the MGM film was set for a ten week shoot starting in October and ending mid-December after the special aired.
The film was a period piece, set in 1927, and was shot exclusively on the fabled MGM backlot, which was a ghost of its former self as well, which would be demolished and converted into a gated community in less than five years.
Hoping to cash in on the popularity of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Parker had the idea of having all of the film’s highly misleading promotional materials show Presley and his co-stars posing as gun-toting and cigar-chomping gangsters of the same order.
It was also at Parker's insistence, which should come as a surprise to no one, that the name should be changed to the nonsensical The Trouble with Girls (1969). And fearing younger audiences wouldn’t know what a Chautauqua was, let alone be able to pronounce it, MGM agreed as to avoid any kind of confusion that might scare off their target audience. And right before it was set for release, they added a codicil, making the official title The Trouble With Girls (and How to Get Into It).
Meanwhile, to make sense of it all, the production would be assigned to producer Lester Welch, who had once produced Seven Hills of Rome (alias Arrivederci Roma, 1957), a vehicle for Mario Lanza, who was one of Presley’s favorite singers, and two low-rent westerns, Gunfighters of Casa Grande (1964) and Son of Gunfighter (1965). The Trouble with Girls would be his fourth and final feature.
To direct, they brought back Peter Tewksbury, who had helmed Presley's Stay Away Joe. Tewksbury was a seasoned TV director, whose biggest screen credit was probably Sunday in New York (1963), a romantic screwball comedy starring Cliff Robertson, Jane Fonda and Rod Taylor.
The husband and wife screenwriting tandem of Arnold and Lois Peyser would tackle adapting the screenplay, trying to hammer some life into the moldy Keene and Babcock book, with a story assist from Mauri Grashin. Like Tewksbury, the Peysers were mostly known for working in TV, and were right in line with the usual second and third tier talent brought in on the Presley pictures to keep production costs down0 and Parker’s profits up on those back-end deals, which would make the inevitable forthcoming disaster a surprise to absolutely no one.
Now, Presley was typically the center of attention in his features. But The Trouble with Girls’ unusual structure, including a number of guest stars and a plot that unfolds through the eyes of two children, resulted in two unlikely yardsticks: the fewest Presley vocals in all of his musicals (three), and the film for which he has the least amount of screen time. (He basically disappears for 40 minutes after the film’s opening number.)
As Bill Treadway put it for DVD Verdict (July 23, 2004) “The Trouble with Girls was a strange bird of a movie. It’s not a comedy, despite the efforts of MGM to promote it as such. It wasn't a full-fledged musical, as Elvis only performs three songs, a low amount as far as he was concerned. It's too silly to succeed as a drama and too historically inaccurate to pass as a period piece.”
And to add even more confusion (-- or insult to injury), Tewksbury and the Peysers decided to churn up the convoluted plot sediment even further by throwing in a murder mystery for … reasons.
It starts in the back of Wilby’s Drug Store, where Wilby (Coleman) finishes up a sexual rendezvous with Nita. Apparently, the store owner didn't fear discovery or missing out on any customers because the whole town is completely deserted due to the populace being currently ensconced at the fairgrounds. And so, with his store empty, and his pocketbook the same, Wilby's hate for the Chautauqua has turned malignant.
Then, as if we didn't dislike him enough already, when Carol and Willy wander into the drugstore, anxious to spend those silver dollars Hale gave them, the shifty Wilby fleeces them by selling a box of leftover fireworks from last year's Fourth of July celebration.
Excitedly taking possession of their unstable booty, the children promise not to rat him out because, technically, it's illegal to sell fireworks this time of year. But as they try to sneak their contraband out of town, the kids run into Mr. Morality (Price), one of the Chautauqua's featured speakers, who starts babbling, quoting, and blustering at such a deafening level the kids duck away.
Upon realizing he's lost his audience, Mr. Morality moves on to the local hotel, where he has to get by Betty (Jaffe), the dinghy desk clerk, before he can retire to his room. Meanwhile, Carol and Willy wind up back at the fairgrounds, where they stash their box of fireworks under a handy tent flap and vacate when they hear someone coming. Turns out it was just Hale and Johnny, who are trying to resolve yet another crisis.
See, the lead singer of the gospel quartet has come down with laryngitis. (Hrrmmm? I wonder who they can get to sub in?). No sweat, says Hale, who takes the stage and leads the quartet in a rousing rendition of "Swing Down Lo, Sweet Chariot." (And as we glance at the clock, here, finally, at almost thirty-seven minutes in, Elvis sings his first song. That has got to be some kind of record!)
Once the quartet finishes, Mr. Morality takes the stage, who starts preaching to the forlorn and downtrodden about shaking off their rotten pasts and starting over clean. Meanwhile, in the audience, Nita is so enthralled by his impassioned speech that she rebuffs Wilby's offer to go back to the drug store for another quickie.
But the man won't take no for an answer and keeps on trying until she threatens to tell his wife about their fling. With that, Wilby slinks out of the tent alone, where he gets suckered into Clarence's back alley blackjack game -- only to strike out there, too. When asked for a chance to win his money back, Clarence says as soon as Wilby has more money to lose, he knows where to find him.
Later, after the Chautauqua closes down for the night, Hale finally starts those negotiations with Charlene -- and it's not going very well. Seems Charlene's upset that Hale hired Dinghy Betty as the pageant’s pianist for no pay. Hale swears he'd never do a thing like that -- but skinflint Johnny might, which he did.
Then, when asked to put out his smelly cigar, Hale happily obliges by tossing it aside, where the discarded butt promptly lands on that abandoned box of fireworks. Thus, as the negotiations start to heat up, with Hale putting the romantic moves on Charlene, who actually starts to fall for his advances, the fireworks start to smolder and burn just when they both lean in for a kiss. But! Right before their lips lock, Hale pauses and orders her to replace Carol in the pageant.
Rightfully thinking this whole romantic interlude was just a ruse, Charlene is now good and pissed off. But before Hale can explain that he was being sincere, those fireworks finally ignite and start exploding. And as all hell breaks loose, Charlene storms off, leaving Hale to join the bucket brigade with the Dover Boys to put the resulting fire out.
The next morning, Charlene heads to Wilby's store for some breakfast. Finding it empty, she takes a seat at the counter. Here, she notices some heated voices coming from the backroom, where Wilby is threatening Nita that if she continues to refuse to sleep with him, he'll let little Carol know what dear old mom does to pay the rent. But when Nita counters that she would kill him if he tries this, with much conviction, Wilby quickly backs down.
Overhearing all of this, Charlene tries to sneak out but accidentally slams into the door. Quickly calling out, she pretends to have just arrived. Wilby appears and takes her order, and a few minutes later, when a distraught Nita comes out and starts taking inventory, Charlene compliments her on her daughter's musical talents, finishes her food fast, and then leaves.
Later that night, while still getting an earful from Johnny on how Charlene must switch the leads for the pageant, Hale heads to the children's tent and catches Carol rehearsing. Thinking she's fantastic, and over Johnny's protests, Hale decides the girl will keep the lead.
Meanwhile, behind the main tent, Clarence and Wilby have another hot card game that comes to an even hotter conclusion when Clarence wins all of his money again, again. Here, Wilby accuses him of cheating. Then, after more words are exchanged, it comes down to fists; but after two punches, a few other men break it up and keep Wilby from going after Clarence. Still, Wilby promises to get even.
The next morning, Wilby conspires with the disgruntled mayor and several other businessmen at the hotel, where Dinghy Betty escorts the latest speaker, Professor Drewold (Carradine), to his room. When she returns to the front desk, the hotel’s manager glumly informs there will be no more Chautauqua. Apparently, Wilby has convinced the other City Fathers to not pay the guarantee money. And no money equals no show. That also means no business at the hotel, which means no job for Dinghy Betty.
Well, we can’t have that. And so, after making a beeline for Hale's room, Dinghy Betty puts her motor-mouth to work, begging him for a job with his traveling show. Caving quickly to this verbal blitzkrieg, Hale says he's got the perfect job for her: as a special assistant to his channel swimmer (Van Patten).
And so, Dinghy Betty is put in a *heh* dinghy, and rows behind the swimmer as she reenacts her epic swim across the English Channel in the local pond after greasing up. Things go swimmingly -- until she bumps into a dead body floating in the water!
When that body turns out to be Wilby, after the big dust-up and exchange of threats over those gambling losses, Clarence is the prime suspect. And as the local constable (Flory) tosses him in the clink, Clarence swears he's innocent. When Hale checks in on him, Clarence admits to cheating at cards but insists he'd never kill anybody. And while his boss believes him, he’s afraid no one else will.
Worse yet, with a member of his troupe accused of murder, the Chautauqua suffers a massive drop in attendance. Word of this homicide travels fast, too, and the next two stops have already canceled their engagements.
In the midst of all of this tumult, Charlene seeks out Hale. Moved by his decision to leave Carol in the lead, despite the obviously huge financial hit it would cause, she's decided that her boss is a man of great character; and so, Charlene confides in him the incriminating conversation she overheard between Nita and Wilby.
Looking to sort it all out, Hale arranges to meet with Nita, who thanks him for all he's done for Carol. (We've gotten the impression that Nita is the town tramp, and this is the first real break her kid ever got.) Here, Hale assures that her girl is very talented and could really go places and do great things before switching gears and asking if Wilby's drug store will stay open?
Caught off guard, Nita breaks down sobbing. How would she know? But Hale continues to turn the screws, saying Clarence hasn't got much of a chance with that murder rap. However, if someone else did it, and did it in self-defense, he could probably get them off -- and make a bundle of money in the process. With that, a stunned Nita quiets down and listens to Hale's plan.
The following morning, Bradford Center is all abuzz as the town is littered with posters and flyers promising that Wilby's killer will be revealed in the Chautauqua's main tent that very evening -- and for the price of one ticket, a person can hear an actual murderer's full confession!
Obviously, the show sells out rather quickly. And when showtime finally arrives, with the constable particularly interested, taking up a spot in the back row, Charlene finds Hale in his tent, where she retracts every positive thing she ever said about him being a person of character.
Seems that harboring a fugitive and exploiting some poor woman for a quick buck has gotten her miffed at him again. But Hale says not to worry because they'll have to return all the money anyway because "the killer" hasn't shown up like she'd promised to. But! As the crowd grows more anxious and threatens to revolt, Nita finally stumbles into Hale's tent, soused to the gills.
Putting Johnny in charge of sobering her up, Hale rounds up the Dover Boys to go and stall the crowd. And here, Hale finally sings again (-- almost an hour after his last song!), and then leaves the Dover Boys to stall some more while he ducks out to see how Nita's doing.
Well, she can barely stand up, let alone speak, meaning they need more time. And since the Dover Boys are dying, he sends for Charlene, with Carol and Willy in tow, and puts the children on stage, much to the audience's delight.
After they're done, Hale then forces Charlene into an impromptu duet about the signs of the Zodiac -- or something. Then, leaving Charlene to fend for herself on stage, since nothing else is working, Hale reforms the bucket brigade and starts dousing Nita with cold water, again and again, until she sobers up and comes to her senses.
Fairly coherent, she's escorted to the main stage, just as the constable was about to break up the whole menagerie. And as the audience stares at Nita, she fidgets for a few moments, then, after composing herself, calmly states, "I killed Wilby ... In self defense." Slam. Bam. Thank you, Chautauqua man!
With that statement, Clarence is exonerated and the Chautauqua's future bookings cancel their cancellations -- and they even get their guaranteed money from the mayor and a promise of more when they return to Bradford Center next year.
But as the tents start to come down, and people scurry all over to pack up so they can move on to the next gig, Hale has one more problem to deal with: Charlene, who was so furious with him over the run-up to Nita's confession that she’s quit the show.
In the aftermath, he tried to talk her into staying, saying his way was Nita's only chance to confess without getting lynched; and Hale almost succeeds in winning her back when he reveals he gave Nita all of the gate money, so she could hire a good lawyer and use what's left to move her and Carol somewhere else and get a fresh start. Stress on the “almost.”
After she gives her goodbyes, Hale gives Charlene $300 to get back to Chicago. But later, as the train prepares to leave without her, Hale tells the constable that Charlene stole some money from him, around $300, and that Bradford Center was no place for a girl like that.
The constable agrees, and as the train pulls out of the station, he and his deputies round-up Charlene and run her out of town by throwing her onto the train. When Hale catches her, after briefly trying to get away, the girl eventually gives in to his embrace, which brings us to...
Elvis’ ‘68 Comeback Special was NBC's highest-rated program of the season, capturing nearly forty-two percent of the nation’s total viewing audience. This would give Presley’s music career a much-needed kick in the ass, with the soundtrack album, buoyed by the hit single “If I Can Dream” cracking Billboard’s Top Ten.
Presley would then complete this career resuscitation in 1969 with his next album, From Elvis in Memphis, returning to his hometown to work with producer Chips Moman at the American Sound Studio; sessions that would produce hits like “In the Ghetto,” “Kentucky Rain,” and “Suspicious Minds.”
In his efforts to get back in front of an audience, Presley and Parker would sign on for a four week engagement at the new International Hotel in Las Vegas. Presley would be the second act to perform on the minty-fresh stage, following Barbra Streisand, who had her own four week run to officially open the hotel.
But while Streisand’s shows were a bit of a letdown (-- at least by most newspaper accounts that I read), when Presley took the stage on July 31, 1969, he blew the roof off, officially ushering in the big horn era of his music career, drawing over 100,000, which quickly led to a five year extension on that already lucrative contract.
The San Bernadino County Sun (February 28, 1969).
And he would officially hit the road in 1970, too, and would continue to do so for the next seven years on some pretty insane touring schedules, where he would often perform 15 days straight in 15 different cities -- captured brilliantly in the feature documentary, Elvis on Tour (1972). And in January, 1973, Presley would take part in the Aloha from Hawaii concert, which was broadcasted all over the world via satellite. Alas, that would be as close as Presley ever got to a world tour, as Parker schemed to keep his act in country due to his own dubious visa issues.
Unfortunately, the ‘68 Comeback Special couldn’t work the same magic on Presley’s acting career.
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Things kinda fell off a cliff in 1967 with the release of the completely insipid Easy Come, Easy Go, Double Trouble, and Clambake; and in 1968, after the release of Speedway, Presley would start to transition out of his Action Man Phase, where he basically played himself plugged into different playsets with the appropriate accessories since the release of Blue Hawaii (1961); a desperate act by Parker to shake things up and get his indifferent and disillusioned star interested again.
Thus, Presley’s last features in 1969 were very atypical. Charro! was an ersatz Spaghetti-O Western, where the only time Presley sang was the non-diegetic theme over the opening credits. Presley was excited for the role, too, hoping it would help him breakout as a dramatic actor; but once again, Parker and the studio betrayed him by keeping the budget low and watering down the narrative to keep things family friendly. The results were pretty odious.
The Trouble with Girls was still technically a musical but more of a narrative that required several musical interludes by happenstance. (Meaning no spontaneous combustion of songs.) With Presley’s salary eating up much of the budget on these latter features, there was never much left for anything else; and the studios weren’t going to invest a lot since they wouldn’t be making nearly as much money on the back-end, splitting it with Parker’s camp, making this all a bit of a Catch-22 and, more egregiously, a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
To their credit, director Tewksbury and cinematographer Jack Marquette do a fairly credible job of capturing the era and essence of these small town tent shows and the waning years of the flapper and straw hat era -- right before the Roaring ‘20s ran smack into the Great Depression, reducing them to a mere whimper, before they were squelched out completely by the Dust Bowl.
Marquette was a veteran of doing things on the cheap, having produced and shot The Brain from the Planet Arous (1957) and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), and had served with Roger Corman on his tropical misadventures that netted Battle of Blood Island (1960), Last Woman on Earth (1960), and Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961).
Together, their film oozes a warm and hearty atmosphere, and the music is charming and really quite good. But the plot gluing all of that together is a hackneyed mess and, more often than not, completely incoherent due to some gaping black holes in the narrative, which makes one wonder if the film was cut down for time considerations or cut around an indifferent star, who is noticeably absent from the majority of the film.
Whichever the case may be, the editor, George Brooks, didn't help matters any by taking the Glasgow Farragut approach with his Moviola. And with these damnable editing torpedoes lies my biggest beef with the film:
From the get go The Trouble with Girls hits the ground running, the camera is always moving, and then moves so fast you're never allowed to get your bearings as oncoming characters and plot tangents bounce off of you like a swarm of June bugs smacking into a car's windshield that’s going about 75mph down the Interstate, leaving you to try to see and comprehend the road / plot ahead through the resulting mess of insect entrails.
The Los Angeles Times (September 10, 1969).
“This picture never makes up its mind where to go and how to get there,” said Margaret Harford in her review for the Los Angeles Times (September 13, 1969). “The period rapidly loses flavor as a hackneyed plot takes over. The trouble with the picture is not girls; it’s indecision by the writers about whether we should laugh at the corny entertainment of 40-odd years ago, or cry over the troubles of a lonely widow who drinks too much.”
Thus, with no real focus, and with no one else stepping up to take the audience's hand and navigate them through this lunacy, the film never jives, and therefore, never stood a chance. Which is why the most fun to be had with The Trouble with Girls is playing spot the cameo -- or identifying some of those numerous bit players.
Here, not only do we get Vincent Price and John Carradine (-- both sorely lacking screen time, but enjoyed nonetheless), but sharp eyes will also spot baseball great Duke Snyder. Apparently, Snyder’s LA Dodger teammate Don Drysdale was supposed to appear, too, but had to drop out at the last minute. Fellow Presleyterians will also easily spot Memphis Mafiosos Joe Esposito and Jerry Schilling during one of the barker's crooked card games.
Meanwhile, sharp ears will also recognize a couple of familiar voices. Now, the interwebs tell me that ten days after the general release of The Trouble with Girls in September, 1969, Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby Doo, Where Are You made its broadcast debut. Why is that relevant?
Well, it took me almost half the movie before I finally placed Nicole Jaffe's familiar nasally voice, and then "Jinkies!" I finally realized Dinghy Betty was the original Velma Dinkley!
Jaffe got into showbiz by answering a classified ad looking for “a short chubby blonde with a sense of comedy.” This landed a debut role in the bawdy Broadway show This Was Burlesque, which was followed by playing Peppermint Patty in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown; from which she was snatched by MGM for a role in The Trouble with Girls.
But! I instantly recognized the voice of the Dover Boy in the Rutgers’ sweater as none other than Frank Welker -- better known as Fred Jones and hundreds upon hundreds of other cartoon voices both human and animal and monster, ranging from Muppet Baby Kermit to The Real Ghostbusters’ Ray Stantz and Slimer to The Transformers’ Megatron and Soundwave to Spider-Man’s Amazing Friend Iceman.
Welker would also provide voice to Cujo (1983), was the dastardly Stripe in Gremlins (1984), the voice of the Martians in Mars Attacks (1996), and he would take over for the late Don Messick in giving voice to Scooby Doo himself since 2002.
The rest of the Dover Boys were rounded out with John Rubinstein in the Princeton sweater, who we all remember got flattened by The Car (1977); Kevin O'Neal in the Yale sweater, who was last seen in Village of the Giants (1965); and finally in the Amherst sweater, we have Charles Briles, who was a resident of Hooterville.
On a sadder cast note, things didn't turn out so well for Annisa Jones, who was delightful as little Carol. Most will remember her as Buffy from the TV series Family Affair, who was destined to die of a drug overdose just seven years later in 1976 at the ripe old age of 18 after ingesting a lethal concoction of cocaine, angel dust, quaaludes and seconal.
Meanwhile, Joyce Van Patten excels as the lunatic channel swimmer, and nobody plays a damaged deb better than Sheree North. As for Presley’s main co-star, Parker had wanted Jean Hale for the role of Charlene, while Tewksbury insisted on Marlyn Mason.
Mason had been bouncing around episodic television since 1960 and was just coming off a run in the Broadway musical How Now, Dow Jones. Apparently, things got so heated during the casting process that Tewksbury threatened to walk off the picture unless he got Mason for the lead. Parker would back down on Hale, but her husband, Dabney Coleman, would be cast as Wilby, the dastardly villain of the piece.
“I do remember very vividly the day I met Elvis,” Mason revealed in an interview with David Adams for Elvis Australia (August 12, 2020). “And that was the first day of rehearsal. Jonathan Lucas was the choreographer. And I walked in, and there were the two little kids that were also in the musical with us (Jones and Pepe Brown). And here came Elvis ready to work, couldn't have been nicer, couldn't have been more welcoming. And it was like that for the next ten weeks. It was absolute bliss working with him.” And no one was more surprised by this than Mason.
“I was prepared not to like Elvis on that first day,” said Mason (ibid). “I thought, 'Here's this fellow I've heard about with this music all these years,’ I was not prepared to like him. I mean, Was prepared not to like him. And I was so surprised when he was so sweet and so down to earth. And he likes to rehearse. He loved to rehearse. He always knew his dialogue. He was never unprepared. He was as professional as anyone I'd ever worked with. And never, ever in a bad mood. Always feisty.”
Mason would also recount Presley’s penchant for practical jokes and general tomfoolery on set. “He loved to light firecrackers. And you'd be in the middle of a scene. And if he wasn't in it, and you'd hear boomp off in the distance somewhere. And the director would say, 'Cut. Elvis, we're shooting'. And you'd hear laughter. But he loved to do that.”
Mason would also join Ann-Margret, Nancy Sinatra and Shelley Fabares as the only co-stars to share a song with their leading man on the soundtrack.
As shooting commenced, Mason and Presley would spend a lot of time together, arguing about music, and playing pranks on each other, where Mason proved to give as good as she got:
“I remember one time I was out of camera, and it was a close-up of him. And I was supposed to be seated, so he was looking down at me. And I started slowly unbuttoning his shirt and taking his belt off very quietly. And he was just giving me these looks. Well, that was what the director wanted. And he just responded. He didn't stop and say, 'What is she doing?' He just rolled with the punches. It was great. He was great to work with.”
As for the Big E’s performance, well, he does his thing. Barely. But in his defense, the role called for a lot of pratfalls that were meant for the likes of Dick Van Dyke, a very gifted physical comedian. And so, it was up to his supporting cast and gonzo bit-players to keep things moving.
Most of the gags don’t land but some manage to eke out a few laughs, like the bit with the local band, who keeps popping up out of nowhere to get an audition only to be constantly foiled; but then finally get their big chance during the big stall. Also watch for several transition scenes with the Dover Boys as they argue the social and political ramifications of the Sunday Funnies.
When filming came to an end, Presley would also confide in Mason a desire to salvage his film career, saying, “I would like to make one good film, because I know people in this town laugh at me.”
As Mason told Adams, “We talked a lot. And that’s the saddest thing he ever said to me, it was just heartbreaking. I don't know how we got into the conversation. And I thought with all his success, he wanted to make a movie that was apart from all his so-called ‘Elvis movies.’”
Presley would get one more shot with Change of Habit (1969). The film began life in 1967 as a proposed vehicle for Mary Tyler Moore as a nun working at an inner-city clinic. Presley would come onboard as the young hip doctor who ran said clinic, who joined in on the folk masses, wooed a nun, and engaged in some primal hug therapy to squeeze the autism out of a young child.
But as Kevin Thomas stated in his review for the Los Angeles Times (November 20, 1969), "Today we're simply too much aware how agonizing social injustices can be for them to be treated with the breezy, jaunty touch of simple-minded light comedy ... To watch all this frantically bouncy, thoroughly bogus business is as discomforting as listening to chalk screech across a blackboard."
Neither The Trouble with Girls or Change of Habit necessarily crashed and burned at the box-office as both would turn a profit but they continued a downward trend. And with his focus shifting back on his music career, Parker could find no one interested in making any more of these “Elvis Movies.”
But despite some efforts to cast him in other roles -- most notably Barbra Streisand wanting him to co-star in her remake of A Star is Born (1976) as a washed-up has-been, Presley’s film career would end here.
And while we can take some solace in his resurgent music output, this flash of brilliance was all too brief; and soon enough, it was back to business as usual thanks to Parker’s paranoiac scheming, which accelerated Presley’s spiral into drug addiction and self-destruction until it all came to an end in August of 1977.
Now, a common misconception over the years was that Parker was Presley’s manager. He wasn’t. At least not officially. No. His father, Vernon Presley, was his manager and Parker was, technically, just Presley’s promoter. There was a lot of cross-pollination there, for sure, and Parker had a huge influence pulling strings on where Presley wound up in his career, so it’s an easy mistake to make -- I made this assumption for decades until I finally got schooled about five years ago.
Regardless, in a December 2, 2024, interview with Guy Raz, Tom Hanks, who played Parker in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022) biopic made this astute observation about the Colonel’s relationship with Presley:
“The genius of Colonel Tom Parker cannot be overstated. There would be no Elvis Presley (as we knew him) without Colonel Tom Parker, without a doubt. But the other side of that is, there would be no Colonel Parker without Elvis,” said Hanks.
Parker and Presley.
“We’re talking about the ego of a man -- a man who is in this for two things: the power of running the show, and the delight of screwing the rubes. He was a Carny, meaning that the carnival comes to a small town; you put up the lights; you put up the ferris wheel; you put up the tents; those people are going to come; they cannot help themselves. And your job is to give them the greatest night of their life, one thrill after another, one delight after another, and also take them for every dime you can. And for 25 cents you gave them a nickel’s worth of entertainment.”
Hanks would then elaborate on this carnival metaphor further, saying, “Parker was very possessive and he wasn’t about to let go of the great elephant attraction that he had. If you wanted to be the richest guy in the carnival, own an elephant -- because everyone pays 25-cents to see the elephant; and they will also pay 10-cents for 2-cents worth of peanuts in order to feed that elephant.”
And like the elephant, “To make Presley more valuable, you had to make him less accessible. ‘If you want my boy, you have to pay me what I want.’ That’s how it worked. He took him off of TV. If you wanted to see Elvis Presley there was only one way to do it. You had to buy a ticket or buy a record.”
And so, at the end of the day, you have to ask, “What did Colonel Parker do for Elvis? He made all of his dreams come true -- he made him a millionaire and a movie star -- (but) at the same time, he turned him into that elephant chained up inside the tent that people paid 25-cents to see.”
All well and good, until the elephant got old, and bloated on too many of those peanuts, and strung out on stimulants to give the people what they paid to see. The same old show, over and over and over again.
Which leaves us once again to wonder what might’ve been if someone else had been in charge. But that’s the trouble with scoundrels, once they get their hooks into you, it’s kinda hard to get them out.
Originally Posted on January 1, 2002, at 3B Theater.
The Trouble with Girls (1969) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) / P: Lester Welch / AP: Wilson McCarthy / D: Peter Tewksbury / W: Arnold Peyser, Lois Peyser, Day Keene (novel), Dwight V. Babcock (novel) / C: Jacques Marquette / E: George W. Brooks / M: Billy Strange / S: Elvis Presley, Marlyn Mason, Sheree North, Edward Andrews, Dabney Coleman, Nicole Jaffe, Frank Welker
