Clambake (1967)
4/10
Dramatic stakes don’t get much lower than they do in your average Elvis Presley flick. Clambake is a lesser example of the formulaic musical comedies the King was churning out at the rate of three a year by the mid-’60s. It also marked a turning point, with both the film and accompanying soundtrack selling far worse than their predecessors. Audiences were tiring of what had become a stale formula.
Elvis plays Scott Hayward, son of a wealthy oil tycoon, who wants to make it on his own and see if girls like him for himself rather than his father’s money. Driving to Florida, he meets Tom Wilson (Will Hutchins), en route to take a job as a water-ski instructor at a hotel in Miami. The two swap clothes and identities and Scott immediately begins holding water-ski lessons, starting with Dianne Carter (Shelley Fabares), who is in Miami looking to snare a rich husband. She sets her eye on wealthy playboy James J. Jamison III (Bill Bixby), who becomes Elvis’s main rival for both Dianne and the prospect of victory in an upcoming boat race.
Nothing illustrates how far things had fallen in Clambake than the sequence in which Elvis sings “Confidence” to a group of children. The song is awful and annoying, a kiddie novelty tune that starts on a bad note by rehashing the myth that Christopher Columbus set out to prove the world was round. Things go downhill from there. We get white actors whooping like stereotypical Native Americans, a random insert shot from an old Western, an ice-cream salesman joining Elvis and the kids climbing over playground equipment, etc. It’s all baffling and cringeworthy.
For some reason, filmmakers consistently had Elvis sing to children, and this might be the nadir of that trend. He comes off like a silly kids’ TV show host. Making Elvis in the prime of life look uncool is a formidable task, but director Arthur H. Nadel pulls it off. During this scene Fabares and Bixby walk in arm-in-arm, making Elvis appear even more like a sad sack. The song’s only function in the plot is so later Scott can tell another character how important it is to have confidence.
Clambake shows just how goofy these movies and their songs have become. The quality of Elvis’s movie tunes had been in decline for a while, as songwriters chaffed at exploitative contracts and lyrics that needed to fit increasingly inane plots. Exhibit A here is “Hey Hey Hey”, which Elvis sings as he and a gang of scantily clad women apply his experimental coating “Goop” to the boat he’ll be driving in the race. The lyrics are laugh-out-loud hilarious:
We got a magic potion that will help us win
I don’t know how to spell it but dip right in
Glaco-oxy-tonic phosphate, it’s the latest scoop
But that’s all right, girls, you can call it “Goop”
Most Elvis movies today are best looked at as extended music videos. Because his films had stopped trying to do anything other than to appeal to Elvis’s existing fans, they lived or died on the quality of the songs. The songs in Clambake by and large are not good. The title track is suitable only if you’re hosting an actual clambake and need some appropriate music. “Who Needs Money”, Elvis’s duet with his baritone co-star Hutchins, is pretty lame.
Only the ballads had much substance in Elvis movies by this point, and Elvis sings them with gusto. “You Don’t Know Me” is an old Eddy Arnold song he delivers well. “A House That Has Everything” and “The Girl I Never Loved” are written for the movie and they’re fine, if not particularly memorable. All are better than the more upbeat numbers, which most of the time in 1960s Elvis movies had a synthetic flavour, coming off as weak imitations of real Elvis music.
The star of Clambake continues to rely on his natural charisma and screen presence. To his credit, while Elvis could have completely sleepwalked through all his roles at this point, his inherent professionalism means he still gives a decent performance despite everything around him. The supporting cast helps. Fabares was one of Elvis’s favourite leading ladies and their chemistry help makes up for the weak script. Bixby similarly elevates a stock role. Veteran character actor James Gregory is a standout as Scott’s oil tycoon father Duster Hayward; father and son have a surprisingly strong emotional scene together.
Two other elements of the Elvis musical-comedy formula are exotic locations and at least one fistfight. The latter is perfunctory at best, consisting of a single punch which should have carried more (i.e. any) consequences, considering who’s on the receiving end. Clambake takes place in Florida but was shot in California. Contemporary reviews noted how sloppy the filmmakers were in disguising the locations, with what The New York Times sarcastically called “real Florida mountains”, and a sunset over the ocean that appears to take place in the east.
The actual location shots are still beautiful. A climactic boat race is more interesting than the car races that were already tired in Spinout simply by taking place on the water. Unfortunately, much of the film looks cheap, as in its extensive use of rear-screen projection. That makes sense for scenes when characters are water skiing, much less so when Elvis is singing to Fabares on a beach.
In the end this is just another Elvis star vehicle that shows how exhausted the formula had become. Releasing dreck like Clambake several months after The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band makes Elvis seem like a dinosaur in comparison, utterly out of step with the times, and is a testament to how badly he needed the comeback that would emerge the following year.