Just perfect...

i must have seen a different film!!

A lot of fun.

The first must-see film of the year.

This is a semi-autobiographical & documentary like account of the early Elvis phenomenon & what all the excitement was about when Elvis exploded onto the scene in 1956. It's all here with the controversial hip shaking gyrations. This movie is a showcase of the early Elvis persona on stage rather than his acting. He's not given much to work with since he's essentially playing himself so he doesn't need to do much acting. Aside from the fight scene he mainly shines as a singing entertainer.Out of the 4 pre-army movies this is my least favorite because his acting is not very good & is overshadowed by the music & the other actors. Lizabeth Scott is the one that really carries the film, her character is very strong & commanding & the driving force that moves the story forward. It's not that Elvis can't act there's just no room to act when he's playing himself.Elvis's acting was much better in his first movie "Love Me Tender" because he was a supporting player to Richard Egan & Debra Paget & he was stepping into a role. Elvis really started to shine as an actor in his next movie "Jailhouse Rock" & of course "King Creole". This early on Elvis' acting career still looked promising.

LOVING YOU was Elvis Presley's second film that displayed him at the zenith of his hip-swiveling,nostril-flaring appeal in addition to introducing some of his best songs( including "Teddy Bear"). Elvis plays Deke Rivers, a young delivery boy who is discovered by a publicist (Lizabeth Scott)who decides to make Deke a star. The paper-thin plot is basically a showcase for Elvis to show what all the fuss was about...Elvis really hadn't learned anything about acting at this point, but no one really cared. Scott adds a touch of class to the proceedings as Glenda the publicist and Wendell Corey has one of his better roles as Glenda's beau, who resents the attention Glenda is showering on Deke. Pretty Dolores Hart also has one of her earliest roles as a back up singer in Deke's band who he falls for, much to Glenda's outrage. A must for Elvis fans and fans of classic cinema who can revel in the presence of Lizabeth Scott and Wendell Corey, who make the most of the sparse material they are provided.

How cruel the critics have been to Presley's films, with the exception of 'Jailhouse Rock', whose monochrome mordancy is more to their liking than the candy-colored 'Loving You'. Yet arguably the latter presents the century's greatest vocal magus more truly, at least when he was young, green and disturbing teenagers' parents.It is not without hints of the temptations that would turn him into a tragic, bloated self-parody. But it gives all due credit to his electrifying stage presence, his modesty and ineffable, courtly charm when a novice idol. You do not feel, as so often in his later programmers, the contempt of the old men jerking the strings for their moneymaking puppet.Plotwise, 'Loving You' is little but a sanitised bio. The delivery boy is discovered, at a political rally of all places. He slowly builds a following in venues such as the Haroldsville Lions Club and the Alkali Wells Stock Fair. He is groomed for bigger things by a Svengali (but a husky-voiced female, not a Dutch illegal immigrant with a bogus military rank) and he learns a few lessons about life and love as the fans scream louder and louder.So far so obvious. The craft is in the detail. Hal Kanter, who came from Elvis's neck of the woods, writes and directs with an eye to the folksy, C&W background of Deke Rivers's troubled youth: the title song is first performed, not in a theatre full of squealing teenyboppers, but al fresco in front of a farmer's family, with chickens scratching behind our troubadour. Deke's main squeeze (Hart) is a sweet pony-tailed innocent, not the wiggling little swimsuited strumpets of the later "travelogues"; Scott and Corey are an on/off showbiz couple with one eye to exploiting their find but another to treating him honourably. There are no real baddies, only hooligans in the diner and bluenosed ladies in Freegate, Texas, readily convertible to Deke's music. Elvis uses his fists only to defend Corey; and he only gets into a big clinch with Hart in the last shot.The simplicity of this film has kept it fresh. There are topical gags about flying saucers, De Mille's "Ten Commandments" (a favourite of the King) and the Freegate finale mirrors the concocted fuss about Elvis's gyrations on Ed Sullivan's show; but the period elements do not obtrude. Even the clothes-- Elvis's denims, Hart's blouse and skirt-- don't look nearly as dated as punk or Goth clobber.The picture is aimed at a wide audience, lacking the silly juvenile-delinquent posturing that Elvis was made to do later to grab the teens. Since the story makes him an orphan, he has no familial bonds to struggle against- rather he longs for the home he never had, and his mistaking Corey and Scott for surrogate parents (while she is tempted to be more than maternal or managerial) is the tale of his relationship with them. Elvis eventually plays matchmaker like Shirley Temple or Deanna Durbin before they were old enough to have their own sex lives on screen.It must have been agony, in 1957 and more than ever soon afterwards, for the mother-fixated Elvis to utter such lines as "My mother's dead" or be told by Scott that "It's time you realised that Momma is never going to come!" During the shooting Vernon and Gladys Presley were summoned to Hollywood, the only long trip they ever took together; they can be seen in the audience in the last scene, and when Elvis comes jiving down the aisle Gladys is among the older "converts" clapping along. She died soon after, and he never watched the film again.Presley was lucky that he commenced actor just as the Method was hitting its height of popularity among younger Hollywood denizens: his tendency to mumble, wriggle and stutter seems less out of place than ten years earlier or later. He begins playing every scene with his head hanging or averted, as if mortally abashed; later he grows a bit more confident and relaxed, but this suits the character's evolution. His rough edges as an actor only make one root for him; he projects likability.It was Elvis's real movie debut ('Love Me Tender' was a rushed, botched job) and a fair sign of what his stock in trade would be. But for Scott, producer Hal Wallis's girlfriend, it was the end of the road: her career was wrecked by 'Confidential' magazine's innuendoes. Shame- she might have blossomed int another Joan Blondell. That infamous rag also smeared Dolores Hart, who reacted rather drastically by taking the veil, though she still has a vote in the Oscars. Kanter returned to Colonel Parker's circus to write, alas, 'Blue Hawaii': Elvis's post-Army induction into the legion of inoffensive entertainers.

"Loving You" was Elvis's second film and tells the semi-autobiographical story of how Deke Rivers, a poor country boy from Texas, rises to fame and fortune as a rock star, and how he is loved by two women, his older business manager Glenda and a sweet young singer named Susan. (No prizes for guessing which of them eventually wins out). This plot, of course, is little more than an excuse for Elvis to sing a number of his hit songs, and not only plot, but also dialogue and characterisation, take second place to the music. (There is some inadvertent social comment about the attitudes of the period- although the action is set in Texas, a state with a sizeable black population, just about every face we see is white).One of the songs which Elvis sings in this film is "Teddy Bear", in which he declares that he would rather be his girlfriend's teddy bear than her lion or tiger. This put me in mind of what "Quinlan's Film Stars" said about him, speaking generally of his film career, namely that his films only rarely caught the electric arrogance that set audiences alight. On stage he may have been a lion or tiger, but in the movies he could be about as threatening as a teddy bear. This was particularly true of his later films from the sixties, bland family fare which probably seemed rather dated even when they came out."Loving You" comes form an earlier stage of his career when he, and rock-and-roll music in general, was frequently denounced by the moralists of the day as a menace to society and a threat to civilised values, and the script makes light-hearted reference to this controversy. The film is certainly livelier and better than some of the later entries in the Elvis canon, such as "Fun in Acapulco" or the particularly awful "Paradise Hawaiian Style", but even so it is still more teddy bear than tiger, with little in it to help us understand, two generations later, just why Elvis was so denounced- or, for that matter, why he was so adored by millions of fans. It makes for undemanding viewing, with some enjoyable music, but I suspect that it is unlikely to be loved today by anyone who is not already a die-hard Elvis fan. 5/10