Elvis Presley was a hugely influential performer with one of the most distinctive singing voices of anybody. He embarked on a film career consisting of 33 films from 1956 to 1969, films that did well at the box-office but mostly panned critically (especially his later films) and while he was a highly charismatic performer he was never considered a great actor.
'Clambake' has often been considered one of the King's worst, despite it being very strongly defended to the point of "I'm right and you're wrong" defensiveness by some here. To me, it is not his worst film, which one would expect from the film with the worst title of all, the likes of a few of his later efforts, 'Paradise Hawaiian Style', 'Double Trouble' and 'Harum Scarum' are worse. But of a notoriously inconsistent film career (that started off good, but became mostly mediocre at best after 'Viva Las Vegas') it also doesn't fare favourably. Not unwatchable but severely undercooked and dare one say it lazy.
There are things that salvage it from being a must-miss film, considering that there are many of the elements that made Elvis' later films so disappointing done pretty risibly, to a mediocre one. Most of the songs are below par, but "A House That Has Everything" and "The Girl I Never Loved" are nice and the best one "You Don't Know Me" could easily have been a bigger hit.
Also thought very little of most of the cast, but James Gregory and Bill Bixby enjoy themselves in roles that could have grated, yet they show that one can have fun without going overboard, something that other cast members could have learnt from. Shelley Fabares has little to do in an underwritten role, but does her best to inject some charm and heart, fair play to her as the role didn't deserve that degree of effort.
While most of 'Clambake' looks cheap, even for a later Elvis film, what little glimpses there are of scenery looks nice and one wishes there was more.
However, Elvis gives a very perfunctory performance as a character that plays too secondary to that of Will Hutchins. This is a bad thing, as not only does one not see that Elvis was a very capable actor when the material allowed it (like in his best films like 'King Creole', 'Flaming Star', 'Jailhouse Rock', 'Viva Las Vegas' and 'Loving You') but also Hutchins spends much of his performance mugging and it grates fast. The rest of the cast go through the motions, this includes Gary Merrill who is a halfway decent actor limited to looking annoyed.
Three songs aside, the rest of the songs are below par. Admittedly the title song is sort of catchy but also gets very repetitive with incredibly simplistic lyric writing. "Who Needs Money" suffers from Elvis and (apparently) Ray Walker dubbing Hutchins looking and sounding like they couldn't be bothered as well as not being a particularly good song at all. It's nothing though compared to the embarrassment that is "Confidence", which in every sense of the word reaches rock-bottom depths in the same way the likes of "Yoga is as Yoga Does" ('Easy Come Easy Go'), "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" ('Double Trouble'), "Smorgasbord" ('Spinout'), "Petunia the Gardener's Daughter" ('Frankie & Johnny'), "Hello Little Girl" ('Harum Scarum') and a vast majority of the soundtrack for 'Paradise Hawaiian Style' do.
Unfortunately, nice scenery is too far and between, with the rest of the production values being of such cheap and made in haste quality it is even for Elvis' later films one of his cheaper-looking films. The colour is garish to the verge of being excessively nauseating, the cinematography is full of in-your face close ups in the very unexciting climax and overuse and abuse of the widescreen process that sees CinemaScope at its cheapest and the back projection is also overused and abused and has rarely looked more phoney.
Scripting is groan-worthy, with very little structure or pace and delivered with very little enthusiasm, the dialogue itself makes even the strongest cheese in the world bland in comparison. The story is basically a very stale and pedestrian re-hash of 'The Prince and the Pauper', a formula tried and tested to death well before 'Clambake' and given next to no variation or momentum. Arthur Nadel's direction lacks steadiness and doesn't seem particularly experienced in film.
In conclusion, not a complete waste but severely undercooked, not even reaching half-baked overall which is a worrying sign, and lacklustre. 4/10 Bethany Cox
