Elvis Dispatch #2: Wild In the Country (1961)

A sometimes-overheated melodrama, drenched in Freudian analysis, so in vogue at the time, Wild in the Country actually gives Elvis Presley a chance to do some real acting. It has some Tennessee Williams elements, some Rebel Without a Cause elements, and features really good performances from Elvis Presley, Hope Lange, Millie Perkins (she who was Dean Stockwell’s wife at the time of filming), and Tuesday Weld. (Christina Crawford, adopted daughter of Joan Crawford, who wrote the vicious Mommie Dearest has a bit part as a slutty girl in town, and she’s acting up a storm trying to show people she can compete with her mama. Sorry, lady, no dice.) Written by Clifford Odets, based on the novel by J. R. Salamanca, Wild in the Country is directed by How Green Was My Valley scriptwriter Philip Dunne.

Elvis Presley plays Glenn Tyler, a scowling juvenile delinquent with a violent temper. The film opens with a terrible fight between Glenn and his brother, where they nearly kill one another, as the no-good on-the-sauce father looks on, half-approvingly and gleefully. We don’t know what they’re fighting about, but the two of them fight dirty, smashing stools over each other’s heads, and such. Glenn knocks his brother down and then runs off, thinking he has killed him. The next scene shows a gathering of a parole board trying to decide what to do with Glenn. Glenn is present, sitting beside his father, and he sullenly submits to the questions of the parole board, sometimes defensive (when the female psychiatrist – Hope Lange – asks him if he reads comic books, he looks at her like she’s crazy. He is insulted.) It is decided that Glenn will be given to the care of his dead mother’s cousin (to be truthful, I got a little confused at the family relationships in the movie), whom Glenn calls “Uncle Rolfe”. Uncle Rolfe owns a “pharmacy”, and sells bootleg liquor on the side. Glenn can stay with Uncle Rolfe, work in the shop, and get straight. Glenn is given a back room in the pharmacy, and Uncle Rolfe says he’ll put a shower in. In the meantime, he can use the tub in the apartment he shares upstairs with Noreen (Tuesday Weld), his loose drunken daughter who has a baby out of wedlock. Uncle Rolfe has set up an elaborate lie that his daughter is actually married, her husband does “government work” overseas and will return any day now, and he bought her a cheap wedding ring. Noreen is a mess. She mopes around in a sundress, holding a flask, and feeding her baby when it cries. Straight out of Tennessee Williams. A fallen woman.

As part of his parole, Glenn has to go have weekly meetings with Irene Sperry, the psychiatrist at the parole board meeting. She is a wealthy widow who lives in a mansion, and she took a liking to the boy during the parole board meeting. At one point during the meeting, Glenn quoted the Bible, only in Latin. “God, why hast thou forsaken me?” You can see her eyes start to gleam as she looks at him, realizing the unplumbed depths of intelligence in the boy.

(Good Will Hunting is basically a remake of Wild in the Country. The parallels are everywhere.)

This is a complicated movie, or, perhaps I should say convoluted, and, during the course of the story unfolding, we have no less than three full-blown romantic subplots, oh no wait, make that four, we have a suicide attempt, we have an inquest, we have various fights in public places, we have long scenes between the psychiatrist and Glenn where they talk about his issues, we have writing assignments, we have scary drives on a rainy night, we have scandal and ruin, we have corruption and manipulation on the part of Uncle Rolfe, it’s amazing how much they were able to get into one movie. Not to mention three musical numbers (which I’ll get to in a minute).

Much of it seems tailor-made for Presley. Glenn’s mother died when he was almost 9, and it is a wound from which he can never recover. He blames his father for being a lazy sonofabitch and “enslaving” his mother, working her into the ground. He wishes he could have been successful so he could set his mother up in a nice house, where she can sit on the porch and watch the seasons go by. Elvis Presley was a famous mama’s boy (even when he was a grown man, his mother would wipe crumbs away from his mouth, in public), and was very proud of the fact that he could provide for his parents. When his mother died, he was distraught. Elvis was also deeply religious and Glenn’s feelings about the Bible are well-thought-out and emotional. This is all personal stuff for Presley, and would also have been well-known to the public at the time, so there’s a bit of a feeling that he’s working on an autobiographical level, which gives his performance a depth and nuance that is unmistakable. Had he ever been given a character like this? Sweet, deferential, unfailingly polite (it’s all “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir”) but with the burden of a bad reputation, that he was somehow born bad, and clearly a bad influence on everyone. He’s a well-mannered Southern boy and he’s also a rebellious angry kid. Like I said: tailor-made. He doesn’t push, and only occasionally does he seem stilted, but that is mainly the script’s fault, not his.

Speaking of the script, I am not familiar with the original novel, so I can’t speak to this specifically, but I was on the lookout for the recognizable Odets-ian flare. These very well may be quotes from the book, but lines like “You’re a complicated human being, not a cheap tin clock”, and “It’s like I’m always walking around with a full cup of anger and I’m trying not to spill it” and “That is an eventuality which will not eventuate”, and the wonderful line, “You made me small that day” all have the ring of Odets. The plot, which tells of a bad boy who discovers he has a gift for writing that actually might help him out of the dreary life he was born into, is also classic Odets. Golden Boy all over again. The clash between convention and individuality. The dark side of the American dream, the crushing of the individual. At one point, Glenn says, in an obvious line – but again, this is classic Odets: “Every once in a while I’d mention about how I want to write. You’d think I set a blowtorch to the American flag.”

My favorite exchange which seems quintessentially Odetsian is between Glenn and Irene (the psychiatrist). Once she discovers how well-read he is (he has a suitcase full of books: Thomas Wolfe, J.D. Salinger, etc.), she wonders if he could write down his experiences. It might be helpful. He obliges her. She is stunned at his writing talent. He resists, making deprecating remarks about the spelling and grammar, but she assures him that he has a voice as a writer. Glenn scoffs, “I’m an ignorant country boy, ma’am,” and she replies, fiery, “Oh, stop boasting!”

The stereotypical response, by a less imaginative writer, would have been something like, “Oh, stop selling yourself short” or “stop underestimating yourself.” But Odets never goes the stereotypical way, and so she says, “Oh, stop boasting!” And self-deprecation and self-hatred can be a kind of “boasting”, and she nails him on it.

The fight scenes and confrontations that Glenn has with his various enemies in the town feel forced, and Presley doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself when he has to be quick on the draw, when he has to get suddenly aggressive. It’s not his thing, it doesn’t come natural to him. But his sweet somber troubled side, his feeling that “there’s got to be more than this”, his kindness towards the downtrodden (he cannot judge, he is incapable of it), and his insecurity when faced with something he really really wants … all of that is as real to him as if he was born to play it. You relax, watching the movie, especially in the long scenes between Glenn and the psychiatrist. Often they appear in the same shot, so you actually get to watch the conversation play out in real time. Techniques like that reveal weaknesses in actors like nothing else in cinema … It’s easy to get your shit together for a closeup, where everything is tightly controlled, but in a medium shot, that lasts for about 3 or 4 minutes, you actually have to listen and react. Elvis Presley knows how to do that. He seems to be a sponge, soaking up the goodness of his co-stars, allowing them to push him further into truth, simplicity, reality. He is not lost in his own thing, he is not self-conscious. He is set free by working with good actors. He had the humility of the true natural. He didn’t think he knew everything, he didn’t come to acting with ego and pride, he knew he had a lot to learn, and would grill his co-stars for acting tips. He appreciated help, wherever it came.

His scenes with Tuesday Weld are nothing short of extraordinary. She is incredible, first of all, an almost feral presence in the film, a ruined person, trapped and shamed. Well, fine then, everyone thinks she’s a whore? Then she’ll act like one. She and Glenn are two sides of the same coin. In a small town, you are stuck with the reputation you are given. Neither of them can escape the judgment of their neighbors (or, pre-judgment). She drinks to ease the pain, and she yearns for love (which to her means sex). She is willing to take nothing for herself, since she values herself so little, but as long as the guy fucks her … that’ll be enough for her. She’ll get what she needs, no need to worry about me, I’m just Noreen the slut. Weld brings a desperate rage to her role. It makes you nervous just to look at her. She would have made a superb Stella Kowalski.

Presley, as an actor, seems to be taking her in, all of her, tuned in to her, knowing that she is great, that she is basically giving him his performance, but also, at the same moment, working on his own level. Glenn has an opinion about Noreen, he grew up with her, they were kids together, and it hurts him to see what she has become. He walks into the kitchen once, and she’s lolling about at the table, flask nearby, playing Solitaire, and one strap of her sundress is flopped down messily on her arm. As he walks behind her, he simply reaches out and pulls her strap back up. It’s a kind gesture, and there’s a bit of pain in it, too. (Subtext being: “Noreen, you look a mess. Come on, girl, pull yourself together.”) She’s not just a whore to him. In talking about her to Irene, he says, “Noreen never stood a chance in her life.” The Bible tells you not to judge people like Noreen (Glenn refers to the Bible as “the book”.) But he’s no angel. He is tempted. He wants her. There are some frankly hot scenes where Glenn comes upstairs to use the tub, closes the bathroom door, and Noreen sits at the kitchen table outside, and you know she’s imagining the naked guy behind that door, and you know Glenn is sitting naked in that tub, thinking about Noreen, and how easy it would be to have her, and it’s all quite fraught and overwrought and hot.

Meanwhile, he’s been dating a girl named Betty Lee Parsons (Millie Perkins). He’s been with her for a while. Her father doesn’t approve of her hanging around with Glenn, although her mother is more open to the idea. They have to sneak around. Betty Lee is trampled on by her parents, and taken for granted by Glenn, but the two have a comfort together, and he trusts her. When he’s in trouble, it’s Betty Lee he comes to. One day, Betty Lee skips church to hang out with Glenn, and her father discovers them flying a kite and making out in a field near the Parsons home. Mr. Parsons blows a gasket about her “breaking the Sabbath”, and Glenn, angry, says, “If you weighed it on a scale, you’d find more God in the sun and air than in that church of yours.” A rather schmaltzy line, if you think about it, but Presley speaks it with simplicity and honesty. It seems real to him, he is tapping into something he believes. There’s a lot for him to do in this movie: he has to fight, and brood, and yearn, and cry, and none of it feels pushed. He is very compatible with the material.

He has a long monologue in his first session with the psychiatrist, a session that does not go well at first. He still resents her “comic books” remark at the parole hearing. But she breaks him down, and Glenn stands up and says, the following speech, with only one or two cutaways back to Hope Lange:

My ma was enslaved on that farm, and I do mean enslaved. Many times I’ve seen her out in the hot sun chopping cotton while them two men laid up drunk and wasted. She done the meals, done the chores that Hank wouldn’t do and I couldn’t. That lady – and she was a lady, ma’am – she’d soak her old stockings in buttermilk and put ’em on her arms, not to burn, and go work in the sun while Pa’s fishing in the river with a jug by his rop. My point ma’am, my point is that I would have bought Ma away from that if I had the chance. Brought her into town, give her a house like this, on a quiet street, set her on the porch in her rocking chair and let her watch the seasons come and go. Springtime, white lilacs, rhubarb, just the quiet sort of thing she liked. She could read, too. Read fine books. There was never the time. ‘Oh dear this is undone and that’s undone’ and ‘Glenn, where’s my mind goin’ nowadays’? She said I’d go to college too. She was bug on learnin’, ma’am. And then, just before my 9th birthday, she died and left me.

The pitfalls in such maudlin material are everywhere, and Presley falls into none of them. He speaks quietly and simply, with an undercurrent of pain (the gesture when he shows the psychiatrist about the stockings on her arms is eloquent). It’s very touching when he interrupts himself to assure the psychiatrist, “and she was a lady, ma’am”. And he does it all in one chunk. It’s not cut up into medium shots, closeups. There are no tricks here he can rely on. He just has to say it and sell it, and he does.

Hope Lange is absolutely terrific in her role as Irene, the workaholic widow who finds herself drawn to the troubled boy. She is older than he is, and embroiled in an affair with a local rich guy, who is married but says he will divorce his wife if Irene agrees to marry him. Kind of sketchy, if you ask me, and Irene seems to feel the same way too. She is a woman alone in the world, with a huge house full of beautiful artwork and beautiful books, but she is lost in her own way. There’s a very funny moment when Presley, always twitchy even in his calmest moments, wanders around her study looking at everything. “Are these your dad’s medical books?” “Have you read all of these?” He looks at a small framed painting on the wall. Everything in the room is classical, portraits and landscapes, but this small painting is abstract, circles of color intersecting to make a grinning cartoonish face. He stares at the painting for a while, and then asks her, “Do you think this is art?” The way he says it made me laugh out loud. Totally natural, a bit baffled by the experimentation, and wondering what she thinks. She laughs too. “Yes, I think that is art.” He shrugs, and moves on to the next object. He doesn’t think it’s art, but whatever, he’s just an ignorant country boy.

The professional lines become blurred between Irene and Glenn. “This is called transference,” Irene informs Glenn on a rainy night when things get too close. Like I said: the psychobabble is everywhere in this movie. Glenn reveals to her in one of their sessions that his mother was “big on learning” and her dream was that he should go to college. Irene starts to push him in that direction, and she encounters a world of resistance. To him, there are only two paths, as he tells her. He is “tempted” by Noreen, and he wants to go down that path, because that seems to be what is expected of him in the town. He was born bad. The other path is to marry Betty Lee, and that seems boring to him, she seems a bit “flat and dried-out” (a devastating line), but she’s nice, he trusts her, and maybe that would be okay. Irene tries to make him see that there is a third path, the path of work. Go to college on a scholarship, work on your writing, follow your mother’s dream, see where that takes you. She helps him apply to college. We hear a bit of his writing, read out loud by a professor at the state university, and it’s all Kerouac babbledygook. Riffing on a theme, repetitive words, piling on top of one another … The professor says, “If he wrote this for a class of mine, I’d give him an A.”

So. Glenn needs to decide who he wants to be.

It’s not easy when everyone seems to have decided for you, when even your own father throws you to the wolves, saying that you are a spawn of Satan.

Wild in the Country represents yet another road-not-traveled for Elvis Presley, and makes me wonder what he could have done if the movies had been better. If he had stuck it out (ie: lived), and not turned down some of the projects he did. The thought of Elvis Presley opposite Barbra Streisand in Star is Born is too compelling to ignore (he was her first choice). Not to mention the thought of him as Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, a role he wanted to do (which would have been PERFECT casting and also shows how well he knew himself. He recognized that role and its potential, and that he could do it.). Naturally, he was advised against doing Midnight Cowboy, and studio execs panicked, but still: the glimpses you get of Presley’s natural ability are undeniable, and he was the type who could elevate himself to the material without strain. Strain was anathema to him. It was all part of his honesty as a performer. If it didn’t come easy, don’t do it. He understood himself. In Wild In the Country, you can see what might have been. It’s all there.

There are three musical numbers in Wild In the Country which is ridiculous because it’s not set up at all as musical, and when the first one comes, you think you have stepped into the wrong movie. It’s like Dreamgirls which had a similar problem. As long as the girls were performing numbers onstage, the movie knew what it was, but when the characters had to sing to one another in true movie-musical style, it completely lost its confidence. It didn’t set up the proper context, like the movie musicals of old did: “This is a world where people sing to one another as opposed to speak.” Two of the numbers in Wild in the Country work fine, because they seem spontaneous, coming out of the situation at hand. But the first one, “I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell”, sung in the car by Presley to Millie Perkins beside him, comes out of thin air. It’s about half an hour into the movie at that point, and we have had no indication that the movie is anything other than a Southern melodrama. Everything is realistic and dramatic. Glenn and Betty Lee have a date, they have a bit of an argument, and then he starts to sing to her.

On the flip side, while “I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell” makes no sense in the context of the rest of the movie, to watch him perform the song as a one-on-one monologue is a total delight. He’s easy, he’s free, and watch how his eyebrows suddenly start to work overtime. It’s a Presley we haven’t seen yet in the movie (and there’s a reason for that, because it MAKES NO SENSE in context), but somehow, weirdly, it doesn’t matter. Presley told one of his girlfriends that when he was onstage he felt “goosebumps” come over him, an electrical current so intense that it was “like making love, only stronger”. You can see him tap into that in that number, even without the use of his body, he only has his face to work with – and you can watch him transform, mainlining those goosebumpy currents. He’s to die for, as ridiculous as the number is. I love the song, too. It’s always been a favorite of mine.

The other two numbers, one sung to Tuesday Weld on a staircase outside the ratty pharmacy building, and the other – an impromptu a capella duet with Hope Lange in the car, totally charming – fit into the realistic context of the movie. The numbers feel situational, not imposed.

While the plot of Wild in the Country gets exhausting about an hour into it, and we still a ways to go, with scandal and suicide and manslaughter and getaway cars … it has an innocent earnest charm that makes it well worth seeing.