Cinema
Coming of Age
Kid Galahad. (London Pavilion, 'U.') ONCE upon a time, and not so very long ago either, Elvis Presley was the sexy beatnik in person, a poor-girl's Kerouac, sore and and not over-clean, with a mop of hair through which he occasionally blinked like some bright-eyed creature temporarily trapped and, half-tamed. His singing, too, had a demented incomprehensibility about it that sounded like the keening of. something unlikely in the Wood- shed, which, combined with the twitching of. 3 pair of excessively tight, faded and frenetic blue jeans, gave you quite a feeling of watching, some surrealist manifestation of teenage art 01 undoubted anthropological, if not cultural, moment. Alas, what with age, success and a spell in the army; Elvis has become respectable. The image has changed disastrously: no bright eye glitters through the uncombed thatch, no s°11; bleached jeans are convulsed to the sound of yowling and strumming, to set the girls screaming as they used to, like banshees: no longer, in fact, is he bounded, misunderstood, or even, °I, the old dirge-like way, allowed to sing (he still opens his mouth and the tune conies out, but it might be anyone making the noise). One 1001c at his hair, a solid block of unassailable' waves and ridges and shining plateaux, is enough _,1° see what has happened. He smiles, shakes hands, is a friend of all the world; in his new film he is simply Pollyanna in trousers. As always hiei gets a rather dim girl, the merest peg on vvhic to hang a banal romance; the real feminine °c/ terest being provided (and as it has happened before there must be some deep sociological reason for it) by an 'older woman.' in this case, the beautiful, starry, ridiculously underrated Lola Albright of Cold Wind in August. And the film's title is enough to show its hero's progress in virtue: Kid Galahad.
IS ',EEL QUIGLY
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