It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963)

(On Cable TV, August 2022) The expression “Clearly a film of its time” strikes both ways for It Happened at the World’s Fair—it would be difficult to imagine it being remade today without being emptied of what makes it special. For one thing, it’s an Elvis film—Elvis Presley here plays a clean-cut young American man (what else?) who’s happiest piloting a small plane or romancing girls (or, in the case of the film’s first remarkable stunt sequence, both at once) but is so unthreatening that an old man sees nothing wrong to ask him to take care of a young girl for a few days. Then there’s the fact that the film takes place at the Seattle World Fair, a uniquely 1962 event. But it’s the Elvis aspect that makes this a film uniquely preserved in time—the ten songs he sings (some of them likable, few of them memorable), the unthreatening womanizing, the sense that there won’t be any serious drama at any time in the film. Another piece of time-capsule history is Kurt Russell’s first movie role as a shun-kicking boy. (Russell would, of course, play Elvis a few decades later, and use his experience meeting The King to record a Presley tribute piece for TCM.)  It Happened at the World’s Fair is never taken seriously, and it’s not that good of a film either: It feels like a second-tier musical running on nostalgic charm more than anything looking like filmmaking craft. The script is serviceable and doesn’t take into account unexpected chemistry (to wit—the early throwaway love interest meant to show Elvis’s character’s good-natured womanizing ends up being far more interesting than the putative female co-lead of the film) or anything like directorial flair from Norman Taurog. But Elvis vehicles are what they are—and this one has the benefit of colourful early-1960s pop-optimism to add to the actor/singer’s undeniable charm. Many Elvis historians agree that It Happened at the World’s Fair is middle-of-the-pack Elvis cinema, and it’s watchable enough as such. But trying to even imagine such a film remade today is an exercise in futility.