06.14.16
Pasadena Elvis Presley Film Festival: “Live a Little, Love a Little”
“Live a Little, Love a Little:” It’s 1968, released the same year as the dog’s breakfast, “Speedway.” And Elvis and his handlers still have no idea what to do in the face of the British invasion.
Inexplicably, “Live a Little, Love a Little” isn’t wretched. In fact, it’s serviceable Elvis semi-romantic comedy. And while on the subject of a dog’s breakfast, there’s an acting K9, Albert the Great Dane, who steals a number of scenes.
Elvis is Greg Nolan, a photographer, who rides his beach buggy (a VW chassis with an idiotic orange plexiglas body, remember the Bradley kits?) into the clutches of “Bernice,” a character who could easily have played “Evelyn” in “Play Misty for Me.”
Bernice has Albert drive Elvis into the surf where he suffers hypothermia. Back at her house, she drugs him unconscious for three days. When he recovers he discovers he’s been fired by his newspaper employer who inexplicably has the pressman crew beat him up. When you were fired at the newspaper, didn’t they beat you senseless?
Forced to move in with Bernice, Elvis lands two jobs on two floors of the same building, one as a soft porn photographer, the other as the photo editor in charge of a high button agency run by an aged Rudy Vallee.
The movie veers between Elvis running the stairs, juggling work and trying to avoid becoming weird Bernice’s prey. Dick Sargent, who always played an affable clown, does decent work as Bernice’s ex-husband, a wealthy man who keeps her financed. In the interstices between the farces, Albert barks, whines, growls and threatens to bite when necessary.
There’s an EP’s worth of music of little account. But “Wonderful World,” a gay throwaway which opens the movie, sets the tone as Elvis goes histrionic in its last 20 seconds. Definitely an oddity for his then moribund reputation.