Spinout (1966)
Movie rating: 5/10
The autobiographical themes that weave through Elvis’s filmography rise to the surface again with Spinout, the second of three movies in which the King plays a singing race-car driver. I watched this movie yesterday on a bus ride back from Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis. Our tour guide generously said at the end, “Wasn’t that a good movie?” Your results may vary. The general rule for Elvis movies is the bigger a fan you are of Elvis and his music, the more you’ll enjoy his celluloid adventures. Otherwise, the only appealing elements in Spinout are pretty girls, car races, and some threadbare humor. Two key elements of the Elvis formula, exotic locations and fistfights, are absent here.
In a clear response to the popularity of The Beatles, Elvis film of this era tends to make him part of a band. Spinout stars Elvis as Mike McCoy, lead singer of 1 Plus 2 + 1/2, which has to be one of the worst band names I’ve ever heard. His bandmates are guitarist Larry (Jimmy Hawkins), bassist Curly (Jack Mullaney) — whose names belie the fact this movie could have used more influence from the Three Stooges — and female drummer Les (Deborah Walley). The plot, such as it is, involves Elvis being pursued by three women that want to marry him: rich girl Cynthia Foxhugh (Shelley Fabares), whose father aims to have Mike drive his Fox Five car in an upcoming race; Diana St. Clair (Diane McBain), author of books such as Mating Habits of the Single Male; and Les, whose tomboy-ish appearance results in a running gag where she has to keep reminding people, “I’m a girl!”
For all its inconsequential plot, Spinout is really about Elvis’s fear of marriage and determination to stay single as women throw themselves at him hoping to tie the knot. The parallels with Elvis’s own life circa 1966 can’t be ignored. While reporters had asked Elvis about marriage plans since he became famous, and former girlfriends such as Anita Wood had hoped to wed him, Elvis at this period was feeling increasing pressure to marry Priscilla. Peter Guralnick writes in his biography Careless Love:
[Getting married] was something about which [Elvis] clearly continued to feel a deep, almost physical ambivalence. Some months earlier he had asked jeweler Harry Levitch to make up a set of rings but then had him keep them at the store. “I put them in the safe, and [something like] six months went by, and nothing happened. So I asked Elvis, ‘Did you change your mind?’ And he said, ‘No, I just can’t make up my mind. It’s just — it’s a big step, Mr. Levitch.” He confided his misgivings to Larry [Geller, his friend, hairdresser, and spiritual advisor], too. “More than once Elvis remarked, ‘Look at Jesus. He never married. [And] I don’t think that this necessarily pointed to a Christ complex, although certainly Elvis suffered from that to a degree. . . . But at age thirty-two Elvis sensed that a real marriage involved commitments he wasn’t sure he could meet.”
Rumors had been circulating for months, though, and Elvis had been getting clear signals from Priscilla, not to mention her father, about the promises he had made. The Colonel, too, was urging him to fulfill his obligations — and even if no one had said anything to him, he knew what he had to do. So just before Christmas he proposed.
The escapism of most Elvis movies in the case of Spinout seems to provide a uniquely escapist fantasy for Elvis himself.
(Spoiler alert for those who don’t want to have this formulaic light musical comedy more than half a century old ruined for them.) At the end of the movie, after winning the obligatory big race, Mike finds a solution for his quandary about which woman he’s going to marry: “Uh, I’m going to marry all of them!” What that turns out to mean is he marries them off to three other men and stays single.
The next scene is one of the more unbelievable scenes in any Elvis flick, which is saying something. Elvis kisses each of the women, all decked out in full bridal gear, before their respective grooms join them in full tuxedo. Even the most fervent straight male Elvis fan might balk at seeing Elvis kiss one’s own fiancée before walking her down the aisle. The word that comes to mind starts with a C and rhymes with “luck”. But good for Mike McCoy and good for each of these women, even if none of the other three “romances” are remotely convincing or set up with more than a few lines. Elvis breaks the fourth wall at this point, an amusing moment and something a more inventive film could have done more with.
Notably, after Les gets married, at the end of the film she is watching 1 Plus 2 + 1/2 — which has a new female drummer — as part of the audience, alongside her new husband and the two other married couples. Evidently in the mid-1960s, even a female drummer was expected to stop working as soon as she got married.
The best things about Spinout are of course Elvis, effortlessly charismatic as always; the performances by Shelley Fabares, who appeared in two other Elvis movies and was one of his favourite leading ladies, and Deborah Walley; and most importantly, the music. The songs represent a definite step up from the lackluster material Elvis had been recording the past couple of years, and he performs them with gusto. “Stop, Look and Listen”, “Adam and Evil”, “Never Say Yes”, the chauvinist but entertaining “Smorgasbord”, and “I’ll Be Back” rock more convincingly than much of his soundtrack work. “Spinout” works better onscreen than on record. “Beach Shack” is schlocky fun in the context of the movie as Elvis sings to a bevy of bikini-clad women, and the ballad “All That I Am” is solid. The numbers are staged with a groovy mid-’60s visual flair, complete with dancers energetically doing then-current craze the jerk, probably already dated not long after this movie hit theatres.
The racing scenes represent the “action” part of the equation, but I didn’t really care about them too much. The result of the big race is always a foregone conclusion in any Elvis film. It was more fun to watch him get run off the road by Shelley Fabares in the opening scene.
Anyway, it’s your standard Elvis film, directed by Presley’s standard director Norman Taurog, who was pushing 70 and could barely see at this point, but still made three more Elvis flicks after this one. The way to look at these movies is as precursors to music videos; a bunch of songs barely strung together by a story. It’s a decent way to pass an hour and a half if you’re an Elvis fan, so long as you don’t think about what other kinds of movies he could have been making instead. Non-Elvis fans can probably skip this one.
