Widely considered to be Elvis' dumbest movie ever and the source of many prime gags in Top Secret, Harum Scarum is worth watching only for those Elvis fans interested in answering the question of what went wrong with his movie career. The answer was quite simply that, to Colonel Parker, Elvis was a carnival concession. He was getting million dollar offers to keep at the same old formula junk and since Parker had no idea how good movies were made he kept agreeing to the deals while the money was there. Harum Scarum shows the formula at its most derivative. Elvis himself looked bored and distracted at times on screen and even messed up some of his lip synching! The bulk of the songs are strictly for the Pat Boone set and badly out of date before the movie even came out. At a time of rapid change and great excitement in the music world (the Beatles made HELP around the same time) the music in Elvis' movies did not evolve or change, it just got recycled. The sets are also retreads, studio back lot leftovers from earlier better movies which look about as authentically middle eastern as a Moroccan restaurant in Brentwood. The costumes are a bad joke, and look like I Dream of Jeannie cast-offs. Elvis himself spends most of the movie looking foolish (and a bit like a Popsicle) in lime green pants. Add in a ridiculously predictable hand-me-down story about intrigue in the palace of the sultan and a few unfunny minor characters, and there is not much to like here, even for die hard Elvis fans. Even Elvis haters looking for a cheap laugh will find themselves bored by this exercise.

Harum Scarum (1965) * 1/2 (out of 4) Elvis plays an American singer in a foreign country is who is kidnapped by a group of assassins to kill an Arab leader but the singer has fallen in love with his daughter. You'd think putting Elvis in a foreign country would lead to something new but outside the visuals there's very little to enjoy here. The humor is very forced from the start and really doesn't go anywhere. The supporting cast are all rather lame and the stuff dealing with the assassination is just as boring and pointless. The songs are also rather bad this time out and after watching all these films in a row I can't help but feel sorry for Elvis because some of this music isn't good enough for karaoke night. There's one really ugly moment where Elvis sings a rather sexual song to a little girl so you've gotta think that perhaps the adult actress didn't show up that night and they threw this girl in without thinking about the lyrics of the song.

Usually, I am partial to Arabian Nights-type romps but, unfortunately, Elvis had better stuck to karate as the few, weak swashbuckling scenes he has in this film show that he is clearly no fencer and, what’s worse, this is undoubtedly the silliest vehicle I’ve seen of his so far, with a meaningless title to boot (no wonder it was changed to HAREM HOLIDAY – also the name of one of the tunes Presley sings in the film – in the U.K.); I guess the fact that the same writer-producer-director team who brought us the dismal KISSIN’ COUSINS (1964) was also behind this one should have been fair warning...The songs are all below-par and, lazily, there isn’t any attempt to give them the expected ethnic touch; one of them even has the star singing as a reflection in a pool imagined by the heroine – a Sultan’s daughter, naturally! As usual with this type of film, the villainess is far more interesting than the heroine but the sheer obviousness of the true identity of the duplicitous villain (Michael Ansara as the Sultan’s brother) is no help either. The would-be jokes involving the clash of cultures generally fall flat and Elvis’ annoying cohorts – a smarmy beggar and ubiquitous dwarf-thief Billy Barty – offer little respite from the generally desperate air of the whole production.

About in an hour into this mid-60's Arabian Nights dreck, there's a moment when Elvis sings the above-referenced song. In this subtle though not well-staged, two-minute scene (Elvis sits motionless and cross-armed by a prison barred window), the song's lyrics sadly reveal what poor Elvis truly must have felt personally regarding his nose-diving professional acting career. He was still a strong top box office draw (So Close), but he had somehow become and remained mired in below even below-average DRECK like this movie (Yet So Far) after the fact that the decade had already produced "Help!" and "A Hard Day's Night." Some IMDb reviewers blame Col. Parker and the evil-Elvis-inner-circle, but I think the blame rests with Mr. Presley himself … a truly American tragic figure who should have courageously asserted himself and said "No more!" even if it meant buying out his movie contracts and firing losers like Col. Parker.As for the rest of the film, TERRIBLE! It has "why bother?" karma (emanating from behind and in-front of the camera) that hangs over the entire production. It begins with a cheesy horrible opening credits then continues w/ Ansara's repetitive "Karnac the Magnificent"-like hand gestures in every scene he's in, then onto Ms. Jeffries wearing a black body-hugging kittenish outfit (w/ matching white scarf) that makes her acting and looking like she's auditioning for Catwoman on "Batman" instead of performing in "Harum Scarum", and then this dreck ends with a Vegas-casino musical number TOTALLY out of place with the previous hour-and-a-half Middle East-based "storyline."Earlier on, there's one jaw-dropping musical number scene that's borderline soft-kiddie porn when Presley (wearing really gay green pants that don't hide the bulge in his crotch) sings to little orphan girl Malkin a song clearly meant for an adult woman w/ lyrics like "I want you for my very own" and "I want to take you home with me." Presley watches as his pre-teen firecrotch (with slits in her dress that are WAIST-HIGH) gyrates faux-seductively. It's a really LAUGH-INDUCING, inappropriate, wildly politically-incorrect musical number.