After her big break role in Dr. No Ursula Andress got to co-star with Elvis Presley in Fun In Acapulco. Not that she or Elvis got to have any fun in Acapulco off the set because Paramount did all their location footage with doubles. On learning that fact I carefully watched all the scenes and if you examine it closely which the average member of the movie-going public did not do you can clearly see that the King is being doubled.Still Acapulco is certainly shown to best advantage with that second unit cinematography. And Elvis sings some nice songs, none of which really charted for him. Fun In Acapulco find Elvis working as a charter boat skipper who gets fired and is stranded in the famous Mexican resort town. He has a past which involves him being involved in a family trapeze act and when he failed to catch his brother during the act resulting in the brother's demise it left him with a fear of heights and failure. Still he can sing and he gets a job at one of the resorts due to an enterprising shoeshine boy played by little Larry Domasin. And he gets two girls falling for him, lady bullfighter Elsa Cardenas and an exiled princess Ursula Andress. That gets Mexican high diving champion Alejandro Rey all bent out of shape. Ursula's dad, a former Grand Duke from some Zenda like duchy is played by Paul Lukas who is now making a living as the head chef at the resort hotel Presley is singing at. Another great example of Colonel Tom Parker getting Elvis the best support possible. I have no doubt that Parker also got former MGM contract director Richard Thorpe who did a number of MGM classics back in the day to direct the film.Elvis does a bit of acting here and Fun In Acapulco gives the King a bit of an acting job which he carries off as he struggles with his fears.I'm sure Presley felt gypped along with the rest of the cast in not actually shooting in Acapulco. The second unit shooting though gives Fun In Acapulco a look like the Hawaiian location films that Presley did. And it's a nice story with a capable cast backing up the King.

"Fun in Acapulco" was one of a number of musical comedies made by Elvis Presley during the sixties, and follows what was a common formula in Elvis's movies- a setting in a popular tourist resort, attractive scenery, equally attractive girls, and a string of easy-listening tunes, often with an ethnic flavour. Although Elvis was still a good-looking twenty-something in 1963, in career terms he was middle-aged, the wild young rocker of the fifties having been replaced by a more family-friendly crooner. Just as much of the music in "Blue Hawaii" had a vaguely Hawaiian tinge, much of the music here has a distinctive Latin flavour. (Not exclusively Mexican; the film's best-known number is "Bossa Nova Baby", and the bossa nova was from Brazil, not Mexico).The plot is essentially a love-triangle involving Elvis's character Mike Windgren and two pretty girls, a female bullfighter named Dolores and Margarita, the daughter of the chef at the hotel where Mike works as a lifeguard and singer; the triangle develops into a quadrilateral when it turns out that Margarita already has a boyfriend, another lifeguard named Moreno. Neither Margarita nor her father is, in fact, Mexican; they are supposed to be aristocratic refugees from some unnamed Eastern European state. Perhaps this detail was inserted to placate that section of American public opinion which refuses to believe that the gene for blonde hair can be found anywhere south of the Rio Grande, or perhaps Ursula Andress's accent was just too obviously Central European to make her credible as a Latina. We also learn that Mike was previously an acrobat in a family circus act and lost his nerve after accidentally killing his brother during a performance; part of his reason for being in Mexico is to try and regain his courage and self-respect by taking part in a cliff-diving contest.The Presley Formula did not necessarily demand great acting or great plots, and "Fun in Acapulco" has neither. Plot lines involving fratricide, even accidental fratricide, do not sit well with light-hearted musical comedy, and the ramifications of the love-quadrilateral are never really resolved. The main problem is the character of Margarita, who is blatantly two-timing Moreno with Mike but gets furiously angry whenever Mike shows any interest in Dolores. To make such a hellcat sympathetic would tax the skills of even the most gifted actress, and although Andress was one of Hollywood's hottest properties following her appearance in "Dr No" the previous year, she was far from gifted. Her obvious physical attributes are much on display here; her acting talents are kept well hidden. Her main qualification for film stardom, apart from her looks, was the fact that she was the second wife of the influential director John Derek, who was later also to make a star of his even less talented fourth wife Bo.Elvis himself is content to stroll through the movie, relying on his charm and his singing voice rather than his acting. Elsa Cárdenas as Dolores is rather better, but the actor who really stands out is young Larry Domasin as Raoul, the Mexican boy who befriends Mike and acts as his manager. (The name is spelt as "Raoul" in the cast-list, although the normal Spanish spelling would be "Raul"). I felt rather sorry for Moreno, having to put up with so much from Margarita, but Alejandro Rey plays him as the villain of the piece, an arrogant, swaggering Latino bully who is put in his place by the quieter, more modest Anglo-Saxon Mike. Ethnic stereotypes are not confined to the characterisation; local colour is provided by endless references to bullfighting, tequila, mariachi music and the desire of Mexican residents to emigrate to the USA.The music is easy on the ear and whatever one may think of Ursula's acting skills one cannot deny that she is equally easy on the eye. Besides Andress and Cardenas, the film features a third glamour girl in the shape of Teri Hope who plays a sexually precocious teenager similar to the one played by Jenny Maxwell in "Blue Hawaii", rather odd casting given that Hope was 24 at the time and had appeared as a Playboy pin-up five years earlier. (Contrary to what one reviewer thought, Teri Hope and Teri Garr are two different people). There are also some attractive travelogue-type shots of the Mexican scenery, although Elvis himself apparently never went to Acapulco; all his scenes were shot in Hollywood."Fun in Acapulco" was the top grossing movie musical of 1963, at a time when musicals were much more in vogue than they are today, so the Presley Formula was obviously a successful one in its day. It did not, however, produce any films of lasting significance, and like most of Elvis's films from the sixties, this one today has the look of a dated curiosity. 5/10

I fully expected to not care for this Elvis travelogue at all, but maybe I was in the right mood because it wasn't so bad. I was intrigued by the basic idea that Presley's playing a former circus acrobat who once accidentally killed his brother who fell to his death when Elvis failed to catch him during their trapeze act. Ever since, he's been terrified of heights and finds himself working hotels in Mexico to try and work out his problems; he takes on two jobs, as a lifeguard and a singer at the Acapulco Hilton. He hopes to conquer his fears by diving off the cliffs, and along the way bumps shoulders with established diving expert Alejandro Rey (who became known as Carlos in THE FLYING NUN), and moves in on his beautiful woman, Ursula Andress. The sights are colorful, even if much of it was faked with rear projection shots of Mexico -- they actually look pretty authentic and it's hard to notice. The south of the border music works within the framework of the film, and is passable (especially "Bossa Nova Baby"). The real stinker this time is the hilariously titled "There's No Room To Rhumba In a Sports Car", but these pictures are musicals, after all. **1/2 out of ****

.....You can see Garr in a few scenes, yer basic bikini/dancer gal as she was in all these Elvis flix-Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout, etc. She is listed here as being born in '49 (yeah guys...)-but Leslie Halliwell had is right-1944. Hello!!!!! Do yer homework IMDB.As for the flick-this is a FUN Elvis meets Mexico meets Ursula movie, typical travelogue, see him dance, rumbha, romance Ursula, etc. All the usual things he did-but here he seemed to be having fun doing it. The movie does have 'Bossa Nova Baby', his last top 10 before the British invasion too.**1/2