Loving You Review
Loving You is one of Elvis_Presley's liveliest and most interesting early films, and has a fair degree of honesty and verisimilitude as such juke-box movies go. Presley proves he can act, at least in a role that bears some resemblance to his real-life persona, and does some good songs, including the title number, "Hot Dog," "Mean Woman Blues," and "Teddy Bear," and everything surrounding him holds up. Lizabeth_Scott, in her last Hollywood feature, plays a less malignant successor to the hardboiled roles in which she'd specialized in the 1940s, in films such as The_Pitfall and Dead_Reckoning, portraying a cool, tough publicist with the instincts of a shark, and Wendell_Corey does well as her sad-eyed paramour, while Dolores_Hart makes a thoroughly beguiling ingénue. Even the band as depicted here resembles any number of real-life country groups that existed at the time, right down to Paul_Smith's performance as Skeeter, who fills the same comic relief role here that Pat_Brady did for the Sons of the Pioneers. The fact that the Jordanaires, Elvis' real-life backing group, are cast as Deke's back-up singers only completes the picture, one of the best in Elvis_Presley's output. The irony is that Presley himself almost never looked at Loving You after its original release, because of the final concert sequence: His mother, Gladys, who died in 1958, less than a year after the movie's release, played the heavy-set woman in the audience, and he could never bear to watch it. Bruce Eder, Rovi
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