Thanks for the memories!

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Frankie & Johnny is in my opinion, not one of the better Elvis movies. But the star power was out in full force: Donna Doglas, Harry Morgan, Sue Ane Langdon.Elvis is a river boat gambler/hired singing help looking for a luck red head to help him find his fortune. His singing costar and paramour that is of blonde persuasion does not care for this behavior. Come for the songs, not the story!

Which is arguably the case with most Elvis Presley movies, where he plays himself, sings a few songs, and the movie depends on the rest of the cast. This is a costumer set in the indefinite past, where everyone is first aboard a riverboat and then in New Orleans.Elvis plays a performer in a riverboat musical entertainment show, with a blond girlfriend who acts with him. Trouble is, he is a compulsive gambler in debt to a number of people on the riverboat, including his thuggish boss. Being a superstitious sort, he consults with a gypsy stationed offshore, who tells him he needs a redhead woman companion to start winning at gambling. He finds one...namely the girlfriend of his boss, and the inevitable complications come from that.This is basically like any other such musical, meant to be amusing without pretense of deep meaning. And in that, the movie works.

The saga of Frankie And Johnny gets a lighter telling in this Elvis Presley film. Elvis plays an entertainer on a Mississippi riverboat circa the turn of the last century with a real gambling problem. His partner in the act is Donna Douglas late of the Beverly Hillbillies who would only marry him if he gives up his ways. Want to bet on the chances that that would happen?Donna and the King work for Anthony Eisley whose number one girl Nancy Kovack, the infamous Nellie Bly has returned and an old gypsy said that a redhead would bring Elvis fabulous good luck. But that causes problems with both Eisley and Douglas.A few new numbers were written for the film, but Frankie And Johnny has mostly traditional ballads of the era such as Down By The Riverside and When The Saints Go Marching In. All done in a New Orleans Dixieland style, most agreeable with Presley.Some others in the cast are Harry Morgan as Elvis's accompanist, Audrey Christie as Morgan's wife, Robert Strauss as Eisley's dimwitted bouncer, and Sue Ane Langdon who spends the entire film absolutely plastered. Watching her complain about not being able to get and hold a man all I could think is that if she drew a sober breath once in a while she might have a chance.Fans of the King should like this one.

"Frankie and Johnny" is undoubtedly one of, if not THE, worst of Elvis Presley's films. Mind you, none of Elvis' films were Academy Award material, but this film looked as if it were a hokey made-for-TV movie rather than a theatrical release. Donna Douglas' singing voice is obviously dubbed as is Harry Morgan's. Presley seems out of place in a cast made up primarily of 1960s supporting television actors. Even the director of the film, Frederick de Cordova, had his roots in TV working with George Burns and Johnny Carson - hardly credential enough to be directing a movie musical at a time when the movie musical was all but dead anyway.I walked away from the movie feeling as if I had wasted my time.