Viva Las Vegas (1964)

Film: Viva Las Vegas (1964)
Stars: Elvis Presley, Ann-Margret, Cesare Danova, William Demarest
Director: George Sidney
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Rating: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Ann-Margret-click here to learn more about Ms. Ann-Margret (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In order to understand what Viva Las Vegas meant to the career of our star this month (Ann-Margret), we need to first focus on the other star of this picture, and just what he meant in 1964.  Elvis Presley is now universally acknowledged as one of the legends of 20th Century Music, up there with the Beatles and Frank Sinatra.  But like Sinatra, Presley's career took ups-and-downs, enough so that before his death he needed to have a comeback, and also like Sinatra, Presley had sort of a second career as a movie star, which reached its financial peak with this film.  In 1964, Presley would've been still a pretty big deal, certainly at the box office (according to reports at the time, this outgrossed A Hard Day's Night despite the Beatles being more relevant to the era's youth culture), but this was a peak for a reason-his career would start to slide after Viva Las Vegas, and in terms of his musical output, was already on the wane at this point (the soundtrack to this film was not a hit), and would continue to skid until his famous 1968 televised comeback.  This is all to say that Ann-Margret getting this part was not a step down in her career on-paper; getting to costar with Presley was still a big deal.

(Spoilers Ahead) Lucky Jackson (Presley) is a car mechanic who is determined to win a Grand Prix race in Vegas, and has been saving for months to buy the new engine he needs to compete in the contest.  However, while trying to woo swimming instructor Rusty Martin (Ann-Margret), he drops the money in the pool and ends up having to work as a waiter in order to make it back (and pay for the debts he's accrued).  In the process, Rusty & Lucky start dating, but Rusty is reluctant to marry a man who puts himself in such danger, and therefore they break up.  However, Lucky finds a mysterious benefactor to give him the money (it turns out to be Rusty's father, played by Demarest), and he drives in the race, winning, and afterwards marries Rusty in a very quick scene (there's no words even spoken).

The movie itself follows the formula of a lot of Elvis Presley romances-he is a groovy, ordinary guy who falls in love with a beautiful woman, and uses every excuse he can come up with to sing (during the "What'd I Say" number, try to spot a very young Teri Garr as one of the background dancers).  Presley's acting is not a draw here (you can visibly see in one scene where he has to fall forward after Ann-Margret has pretended to shoot him with her finger that he has missed his mark of where to fall, and for some reason the editors didn't notice this & kept it in the movie).  But, the reason you watch an Elvis Presley film is for the musical numbers, not the plot or acting.

Unless you're a major Presley fan, you're only going to recognize the title track as being an Elvis hit ("The Yellow Rose of Texas" is also sung, but that's not really a song associated with Presley).  The movie is stupid, very stupid in fact, but it kind of works in the way that certain stupid movies do. Presley is a good singer, he looks great, and Ann-Margret is awesome against him because she's the rare person that understands that he's a little ridiculous.  Presley, so ingrained in pop culture is he at this point, looks more like Bugs Bunny than a flesh-and-blood human being to a modern audience, and so Ann-Margret making Rusty super over-the-top is a smart counter.  The actress is in a cascade of skimpy outfits showing off her physique, but it's in hyper-sexualized line readings that she steals the movie from Presley.  She honestly sounds (and I don't mean this to be rude, but I have no other way of putting it) like she's having an orgasm every time she commits to a line reading, making Rusty a smart combination of "girl next door" and Playboy bunny...which was, let's face it, the combination that made Ann-Margret famous.

Ann-Margret dated Elvis Presley for roughly one year, and they were supposedly broken up by the end of this shoot.  The actress, though, is notable in that she's one of the only people who costarred (or romanced) the legendary singer who has not made a lot of public comments about their relationship, and has been very reluctant to discuss it publicly (you can google and find an uncomfortable Charlie Rose interview where he keeps pushing her to talk & you can tell she's not happy).  It's clear based on what was released that they did have a romantic relationship, what seems like a very serious one, but it didn't last, and Presley would go on to make increasingly lambasted movies before recovering his musical career, and then dying famously at the age of 42 of a heart attack.  Ann-Margret could've done something similar, and for a while she did-she would go on to do dismissible sexpot roles in the late 1960's opposite Dean Martin & Tony Franciosa, and made some bad career decisions, most notably turning down the Jane Fonda role in Cat Ballou.  She even, like Elvis, became a headliner in Las Vegas.  But next week we're going to find that Ann-Margret was very different than a lot of the sex symbols we've profiled this year who only got one major peak of fame, and then rode that until the end.  Ann-Margret, as the 1970's approached, was about to experience a surprising second act in her career.