Watched the Elvis movie DOUBLE TROUBLE today. It starts with him singing the theme song about how he's got double trouble, "twice as much as anybody else." And my first reaction was to say, "Yep! The math checks out." Because double trouble is twice as much as regular trouble. But! Then I started thinking... "twice as much as anybody else?" If so, Elvis would have to assume that the person with the MOST TROUBLE IN THE WORLD (aside from him) had only half as much trouble as Elvis, which doesn't seem likely. DOUBLE TROUBLE struck me as the strangest Elvis movie I have ever seen, and he made some weird ones. I jotted down a few strange things about it in one of my jotting books I usually take on trips, but nobody goes on trips anymore. 1. Robert Altman fave Michael Murphy is in this movie! He seems to be playing... wait. I should mention right now that I'm about to lay down major spoilers for the Elvis movie DOUBLE TROUBLE. Okay! Here we go. Michael Murphy seems to be playing Elvis's good-natured fresh-faced romantic rival. But! He turns out to be a psychotic assassin. So that was a surprise. He and Elvis get into a kind of martial arts fight, and Elvis KILLS MICHAEL MURPHY! Okay, I mean, Elvis ducks out of the way and Michael Murphy makes a leap and falls into a well and dies. 2. Remember, this is a list of just a few of the strange things about DOUBLE TROUBLE. Oh! Elvis is forced to sing a rockin' version of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." It hurts! 3. Most (?) of the plot is about whether Elvis can hold out until his love interest becomes of legal age (!!!). 4. All right. So Elvis is going around Europe, and I thought, given the title, there would be a prince or a duke or somebody who looks exactly like Elvis. You know that plot. But! There is naught of the sort, save a vague mention that Elvis's girlfriend's aunt looks just like her??? It comes up a few times in passing conversation. But unless I missed something, we never see the aunt. So the promise of some identity comedy based on lookalikes (such as Elvis's KISSIN' COUSINS) is dangled out there and snatched away. There is no good reason (unless, again, I walked out of the room for a moment and missed something) for this movie to be called DOUBLE TROUBLE. 5. Finally, this film has much truck with the uncanny, as Freud called it. There are a lot of creepy masks, weird doll-like figures, mannequin heads (see above) and the like... a definite fascination with the carnivalesque, to use one of Dr. Theresa's favorite phrases from grad school - indeed a term she still finds useful today. And so do I, because sure enough, there is no better... wait. I was going to wrap it all up with a nice bow there, but I just remembered: 6. A minor character who has a mental illness and thinks Elvis is her husband.
