Elvis Dispatch #3: Girl Happy (1965)

Girl Happy should be called “coitus interruptus”. No one has sex in Girl Happy (except for the hoards of teenage kids on spring break in the bushes, that is). The four leads, on a paid vacation from Chicago, try to get laid repeatedly but their official duties keep getting in the way. If the damn phone rang one more time just as Elvis Presley was getting hot and heavy with some coed I thought I would explode. I can’t be sure of this, but I think Girl Happy may be the first Elvis Presley movie I saw when I was a kid. He’s in his prime here. Tall, lean, with blue-black immaculate hair, and no more baby fat. Director Boris Sagal keeps things moving, not worried about the ludicrous nature of the plot (because honestly, who cares), and there are a couple of very funny cuts. The pace is good, the cast is good, and the colors are so bright your eyes ache.

Rusty Wells (Elvis Presley) hails from Chicago (although it is hard to picture him from anywhere other than the South), and he heads up what is essentially a boy band, a four-piece group consisting of Doc (Jimmy Hawkins), Wilbur (Joby Baker), and Andy (Gary Crosby). They have a regular gig at one of those only-in-the-movies supper clubs, but every year they go down to Fort Lauderdale for spring break and play a gig there. They love water skiing and watching the babes in the bikinis and they live for it. The supper club is run by a Chicago gangster named Big Frank (Harold J. Stone) who is straight out of central casting. Everyone lives in fear of him. He’s connected. The boys try to tell him they need a week off to go down to Florida, but he says No. The boys are stuck. What are they to do? They charge into his office to plead their case, and Rusty – who is the clear leader of the group – overhears Big Frank murmuring to himself with worry over his daughter, a college girl who has just informed him over the phone that she is going down to Fort Lauderdale for her spring break. He doesn’t want to let her go. Rusty gets an idea. Why don’t he and his boys go down to Fort Lauderdale and keep an eye on her?

The creepiness of this situation is barely remarked upon and everyone seems to think it is normal. Rusty informed Big Frank that “30,000 sex maniacs” go down to Fort Lauderdale every spring break, his daughter would be safe with them.

Once down in Fort Lauderdale, the four boys check into the Sea Drift motel, where Valerie (Big Frank’s daughter), played by Shelley Fabares has checked in with her friends. The Sea Drift is heaven on earth, with a pool, palm trees, and rooms that open directly onto the pool. The boys are directly across from Valerie’s room, and there are goofy shots of the four of them peeking out of the blinds like criminals.

Their first glimpse of Valerie is a girl in glasses and a big flowing coat tripping over one of the lawn chairs by the pool as she struggles with her suitcase. The boys breathe a sigh of relief. She’s clearly a dork. No sex maniac will be chasing after HER. Looks like it’s going to be an easy assignment. (Girl Happy is full of completely offensive stereotypes, all presented with gleeful innocence and unquestioning faith. The brainy boy is a nerd who can’t get girls and wears a sun guard on his nose. The lines are clearly drawn. There are those who are sexy and those who are not.) But then she goes to sit by the pool in a bright pink bikini and the creepy boys behind the blinds start to get worried. Hm. She’s kind of hot.

Rusty takes matters into his own hands and strolls up to her, playing the guitar, and singing a welcoming song called “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce”.

Naturally, at first, she is charmed, then suspicious when she sees him singing the same damn song to a hottie across the way, and never once does she suspect that the tall dude with the black hair is on the payroll of her father. She goes about living her life, and gets into many scrapes that the boys try to get her out of (they live in fear of what Big Frank will do to them if they don’t protect her), and there’s an Italian guy on her tail (and we all know that those boys are only after one thing!), and meanwhile: all of them are trying to get laid as well, but they keep getting distracted by some issue with Valerie, annoying nearly every girl in Fort Lauderdale who tries to hook up with them. Rusty comes back to his Sea Drift pad to see the lady he left in the lurch had written “DROP DEAD” on his mirror in lipstick, and the other three guys mournfully say they all got similar messages on their mirrors.

Rusty then takes matters into his own hands, let the other three boys go girl-hunting, while he hangs out with Valerie. Love, you know, begins to blossom. But there is that little pesky problem of the lie behind all of it. Rusty is paid to be there. What will Valerie do when she finds out??

It’s all very stupid and every minute of it is enjoyable. The movie is brash, shallow, and fun. It has confidence in what it is trying to be. Easier said than done.

Girl Happy is full of music, and one veritable giant production number (“Do the Clam”).

I have to say a couple of things about “Do the Clam”. It starts out as a ruse to draw Valerie, out on her date with the sex maniac Italian, to them so they can keep an eye on her. The boys start up a song out by the beach (you know, because they clearly drag their amplifiers around with them), and all of the kids making out in the bushes emerge to go CRAZY. Despite the subtext being panic about sex, the movie is actually rather frank about what teenagers do, and the scenes of literally hundreds of kids emerging from the shadows in various stages of undress to gyrate on the beach makes that point. It’s cheerful. It’s not phobic. Everyone is having tons of sex. That’s what Fort Lauderdale is all about. And Elvis, in “Do the Clam”, is actually forced to do some set choreography, and I burst out laughing when I saw it. He looks awkward and stilted, it doesn’t suit him at ALL, but there he is, obedient and cheerful, doing the stupid dance and I kind of love him for it. He’s way too Alpha to look entirely bad. Whatever, the guys in suits are making me do this dumb dance, when all I need to do is cock my shoulder up and girls go wild across the land, but whatever, this is the job, so here I go doing the clam. It’s totally charming. And take a look at the choreography in the hands of the clearly professional dancers all around him. Look at how those dancers are selling it. Famous choreographer David Winters did the choreography (uncredited) and it is great stuff. The movements are completely in line with the situation: an impromptu beach party, and it is what choreography in the movies should be. It seems spontaneous, it comes out of the situation, and it utilizes the set in inventive ways (lots of rolling around in the sand, and tumbling down dunes, etc.). The dancers are excellent. I love the two boys and a girl, who, covered in sand because they have been rolling around in it, jam OUT to the music – watch the guy on the right, he’s so IN IT. The number – while kind of stupid (“Do the Clam”? No. I refuse. It’s a dumb dance, I won’t do it – although I do have vivid memories of doing the “Pulling Mussels From a Shell” dance at various frat parties in college with complete fervor and abandon) – is filled with joy and spontaneity.

The whole movie is like that.

Elvis Presley brings his tender side out, which, combined with his slicked-hair tough-guy looks, makes him who he is. When he sings a love ballad to a girl, more often than not, he looks at her mouth as he sings. The guy wasn’t a dummy. He’s not just singing the song, he’s DOING something with the song. Providing a subtext, if you will, the subtext being the simple: “I want to kiss you right now.” These all may seem like simple things, and they are, but in the hands of Elvis Presley it becomes a compelling and almost embarrassingly sexual moment. That’s one of the things he brought out into the open. That side of all of us that just wants to get naked. Now. It’s hard to remember (well, I wasn’t even alive, so I don’t remember at all) what a revolution that was. Girl Happy is 1965. The sexual revolution is obviously already heating up, the birth control pill was available circa 1960, which changed the game entirely, and although things wouldn’t explode into the “psychosis” (as Lester Bangs put it) for a couple of years, the ground is already prepared. You can see it in Girl Happy.

On that note, I will leave you with the crazy sexual performance Elvis gives in “Wolf Call”, another sort of stupid number, where Rusty picks a girl out of the audience to sing to her, and basically sex her up in front of the audience. Rusty will end up regretting his choice, because this dame is the girl who ends up scrawling “DROP DEAD” on his mirror because every time they’re about to get started to get busy, one of the boys interrupts with an urgent call that something is happening with Valerie across the way.

I know I am talking as a hetero woman so there is that bias to consider, although I think men responded sexually to Elvis too (I recall the opening scene in True Romance where Christian Slater said if he “had to fuck a guy, I’d fuck Elvis”) – whether it be out of wish-fulfillment, projection of what they want to be, or flat out just being assaulted by his sexual energy like everybody else on the planet was. When he goes backstage with the dame in “Wolf Call”, to cheers and catcalls, he says, “Why don’t you take me with you?” and she says, laughing, “I wouldn’t know what to do with you.”

I mean, look at him. Who would know what to do with that? Well. I would. I’m sure we all feel we would. But still. It’s an assault.

How did he do it without being sleazy, smarmy, creepy? Who knows. I have some ideas. In “Wolf Call”, what he brings to the sex table is sex, yes. It’s blatant. He’s not embarrassed about it. But it’s FRIENDLY sex, albeit a little overwhelming. It’s not ogling nasty Seven Year Itch sexuality, repressed and tight and phobic. It’s open and natural, but he also means business. He doesn’t hide that he means business. But in a current alongside of that is friendliness, which, as any woman will tell you, anywhere, anytime, is a killer combo.

Girl Happy is dumb, satisfying, colorful, charming, and funny.