Stay Away, Joe

1968

PG

This isn’t a scary Halloween themed movie like I’ve been trying to do in October, but it does continue another tradition that I have been doing with movie reviews. This is another entry in my Elvis Film Reviews. So far, I have reviewed 5, this will be the 6th. This film happens to be the 26th of Elvis’s 31 films. In previous Elvis movie reviews, I mentioned that I have reviewed, for the most part, his most beloved acting efforts. On IMDb, Stay Away, Joe happens to be his 2nd worst rated film, so I wanted to see if it was an accurate rating. At the end of the reviews, I have started this new thing with Elvis Movie Reviews where I rank them in order of how I personally like them. Let’s see where Stay Away, Joe ranks among the 5 other movies and let’s break down this film.

The film starts by showing Joe Lightcloud (Elvis Presley) who happens to be a prizewinning Rodeo star. He returns home to his family’s reservation in Arizona in his big, white Cadillac. He helps herd up the cattle in his Cadillac convertible upon his entry, but runs the car into a pond and ruins it. The local congressman greets the Lightcloud family; Charlie (Burgess Meredith), Annie (Katy Jurado), and Grandpa (Thomas Gomez) before Joe finally arrives and the family is told that Joe talked the congressman into letting the family have 20 cows and a bull to prove that the family could raise cattle on the reservation and be profitable. However, if they fail to succeed, the Navajo people will no longer get government help. To celebrate, the family has a large party and invites all of their family and friends. It turns out most of them get drunk and Joe’s friend, Bronco (L.Q. Jones), mistakenly barbecues the only bull in their herd.

Joe calls on another friend to borrow a bull that is named Dominick, but the bull has no interest to expand the herd (so to speak). Joe stops in the local bar and meets an old friend by the name of Glenda Callahan (Joan Blondell). Glenda’s daughter, Mamie (Quentin Dean) has taken an interest in Joe, but Glenda doesn’t approve. Every time that she sees Joe and Mamie together, she shoots at Joe. Joe’s Cadillac when he first returned was ruined, so he decided to trade in for a new car. The car dealership says that they will trade for anything and Joe gives them an old horse and drives off before the salesman can dispute it.

Joe doesn’t enjoy the new car for long though, he sells parts from the car to raise money for his family. The family tries to fix up the home because they find out that Joe’s sister and Charlie’s daughter, Mary Lightcloud (Susan Trustman) is bringing her fiancé, Lorne Hawkins (Angus Duncan) and his mother (Anne Seymour) over to visit and they want to impress Lorne’s mother. Eventually the car gets to a point where it is no longer in driving condition. Joe and the guy he borrows the bull from get into a fight over the bull that was supposed to be a prize-winning bull. Joe is told that it is a prizewinning rodeo bull which gives him an idea. He takes the bull to the local rodeo and challenges the local riders to attempt to stay on the bull and if Joe himself can stay on the bull for 8 seconds, he gets the prize money. Nobody is successful, but Joe wins the money after becoming the only rider to ride the bull. The money is of no use to the reservation though, because a big, playful family brawl causes the house to collapse. The family shares a big laugh in the end.

Yes, you read all of that correctly and I know what you’re probably thinking. This sounds like a stinker, doesn’t it? It sure does, because it is. This movie was horrible. I don’t think the word “horrible” does it justice. This was Elvis’s second worst rated film and to be honest, if this isn’t the worst, I don’t want to find out which is actually his worst. To say this film is dated in 2020 is a huge understatement. I don’t think I’m really going out on a limb when I say this, but this film seems dated for 1968.

First of all, before I watched this film, I did a quick glance at the plot and I didn’t have a good feeling about it from the start. Elvis portrays a Native American in this film. Elvis does have some Cherokee ancestry on his mother’s side, but it was 3 or 4 generations down the line. Elvis doesn’t look like a Native American and to make matters worse, most of the main cast didn’t either. The actress that portrayed Joe’s stepmother happened to be born and raised in Mexico and she did portray a Mexican woman, but that is it. I realize that this film is a comedy, but the family was made out to be a bunch of poor rednecks, who did nothing but get drunk and roughhouse each other, and I don’t mean in a good way like they do with the Trailer Park Boys.

The cast was actually a pretty decent one considering the circumstances. I felt like I recognized the man who played Joe’s father in something else, but he was covered in ridiculous makeup, so I couldn’t exactly tell who he was when I was watching it. Joe’s father is played by Burgess Meredith, and if you don’t know who that is, you likely recognize him as Rocky Balboa’s trainer, Mickey from the Rocky movies. Katy Jurado was a famous Mexican actress in the 40’s and 50’s, but she is probably most known for her Golden Globe winning performance in High Noon. She was the first Latin American actress to be nominated for an Oscar and the first to win a Golden Globe. Joan Blondell was famous in the 30’s and 40’s mostly, but nominated for 2 Golden Globes and an Oscar spanning through the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. Blondell and Elvis also share something in common. They both earned stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame when the official groundbreaking was held in 1960. Katy Jurado and Burgess Meredith also have stars on the Walk of Fame, but they received theirs nearly 30 years later. There are only two people in the cast still alive.

The film was absolutely bad and I don’t think the blame goes to the actors, because it seemed like they made the most of it, even if that meant some of them appeared toasted when they weren't supposed to be. The story was horrible and a lot of the film didn’t make any sense. At first, the main focus was on Joe and him trying to help his family, but for more than half of the film, it seemed like the main focus was on the bull who wouldn’t mate with the cows. As bad as that sounds, that was the case in this movie. Although Joe had a few potential love interests in the film, the main love interest was Mamie, who was 19 years old, but acted like she was about 13. This was a little unsettling, just like the majority of this film. Earlier, I mentioned that this film was feels like it would be dated in 1968, in 2020 standards, it is just plain offensive. It surprises me that this film made a profit. Elvis made $800,000, which is over $6 Million today, on the film not counting his 40% profit share. There were 4 songs featured in the film and one song in particular, “Dominick”, Elvis made the record producer promise that the song would never be released. I personally liked the film’s opening song,”Stay Away”, but the other ones didn’t fit into the movie at all. The songs were performed, without an explanation, by a random rodeo rider who happened to be Elvis Presley. One positive, probably the only positive, from the film was the western, Arizona scenery. The locations where the movie was filmed were beautiful.

Would I recommend this? Absolutely not. Even if you’re and Elvis fan, I don’t recommend this at all. If you are indeed an Elvis fan that is dead set on watching all of his films, go ahead, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you need confirmation about people saying that this was a time in which Elvis wanted to get out of Hollywood, because of him being casted in horrible movies, this is the perfect film to watch to confirm that. Thankfully 9 months later, the ’68 Comeback Special aired and he made his return to music on a full-time basis. I guess I’ll give it half of a point, because it is indeed a movie, but not much more. If your name is Joe, take this movie title as a warning and if you name isn’t Joe, just stay away from this film.

GRADE: 0.5/5

Yacs

Other Reviewed Elvis Movies (ranked in the order of my personal favorites)

Stay Away, Joe