Love Me Tender (20th Century-Fox). Is it a sausage? It is certainly smooth and damp-looking, but who ever heard of a 172-lb. sausage 6 ft. tall? Is it a Walt Disney goldfish? It has the same sort of big, soft, beautiful eyes and long, curly lashes, but who ever heard of a goldfish with sideburns? Is it a corpse? The face just hangs there, limp and white with its little drop-seat mouth, rather like Lord Byron in the wax museum.
But suddenly the figure comes to life. The lips part, the eyes half close, the clutched guitar begins to undulate back and forth in an uncomfortably suggestive manner. And wham! The midsection of the body jolts forward to bump and grind and beat out a low-down rhythm that takes its pace from boogie and hillbilly, rock 'n' roll and something known only to Elvis and his pelvis. As the belly dance gets wilder, a peculiar sound emerges. A rusty foghorn? A voice? Or merely a noise produced, like the voice of a cricket, by the violent stridulation of the legs? Words occasionally can be made out, like raisins in cornmeal mush. "Goan . . . git . . . luhhv . . ." And then all at once everything stops, and a big, trembly tender half smile, half sneer smears slowly across the CinemaScope screen. The message that millions of U.S. teen-age girls love to receive has just been delivered.
In his first screen appearance, with four songs and a secondary role as the hero's little brother in an otherwise routine south western, Elvis Presley all but steals the show from such better-knowrn players as Richard Egan. Debra Paget and Mildred Dunnock. Hollywood, moreover, foresees a box-office bonanza when the millions who buy Presley's pressings (Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog) go to see his first picture—and that will really be a steal.
Marcelino (Charmartín; U.M.P.O.). In the 13th century after Christ, King Alfonso X of Castile and Leon, by his courtiers called "The Wise." commanded that a chronicle be made of all the miracles that in all times had occurred within the limits of his realm. It was done; and among the marvels that the scholars heard and dutifully set down was the story of Marcelino.
A long time ago. before people stopped noticing miracles and started saying that they do not happen, a newborn baby was left one summer's night at the gate of a little Franciscan cloister that sat on the top of a high hill in the land of Spain. "It's a baby!' gasped the friar who found the precious package. He conducted a discreet investigation: "It's a boy!" And he ran to show the others what a wonder had come into their quiet lives. Brother Thomas, the cook, a man as simple and round and solid as Mother Earth, took charge of the situation. The child was crying. Brother Thomas dipped a cloth in water and gave it to him to suck. The crying stopped. Everybody began to smile. A young monk turned to the Father Superior with a pleading look. "C-can we keep him. Father?"
They kept him. The Father Superior was won over in the end, even though he insisted that the child needed a mother.
They christened the baby Marcelino because he had come to them on St. Marcelino's Day, and each of the brothers tried to be both a mother and a father to him.