All 33 Elvis Movies, Ranked from Worst to Good (Photos)

Elvis Aaron Presley was a controversial and transformative figure in American music, and one of the most recognizable 20th century icons. He was also the star of a shocking number of financially successful but, mostly, not very good movies.

“The King,” as he has been called, made an initial attempt at serious acting in the 1950s, but his cinematic career was quickly derailed by a stint in the Army, and upon his return found he could sell the most tickets — and the most soundtrack records — by headlining generic, family-friendly musical fluff. There are hidden treasures in Presley’s filmography, but they are extremely well hidden, and before you find them, you might have to endure some of the biggest stinkers of the era. (Even Elvis himself wasn’t a fan of a lot of them.)

So let us be your guide, as we escort you through the treacherous waters of every single Elvis Presley movie, ranked from worst to… let’s say “good.”

Honorable Mention: “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is” (1970)

It’s unfair to compare Elvis Presley’s two documentaries to his dramatic roles, so let’s let them off the hook and call them Honorable Mentions. Presley returned to the stage after a decade of focusing on his film career, and in this concert film from Oscar-winning filmmaker Denis Sanders, waves of relief practically radiate off the screen. The first third is a behind-the-scenes look at his rehearsals and backstage nerves, but the rest of the film is a strong set of hit songs, with The King playfully winning over the audience and settling back into his element. It’s not the most polished concert film, but it’s a treat.

Honorable Mention: “Elvis on Tour” (1972)

Presley’s second concert film tries a little harder to integrate actual documentary filmmaking between the musical numbers, to sometimes satisfying and sometimes comical effect. (One montage of his famous movie kisses seems to have been crafted entirely out of clips from his most embarrassing films.) Too many of the songs are repeats from “That’s the Way It Is,” and Presley already seems to have lost a lot of the energy he regained from his big return to the stage. It’s not The King at his best, but it ain’t The King at his worst.

31. “Stay Away, Joe” (1968)

Presley (at a low point in his career) plays a Navajo man who arranges for his father, Burgess Meredith (also at a low point in his career), to get a herd of cattle from the U.S. government. If he can make a profit, the government will aid all indigenous peoples, so there’s a lot at stake here. However, they get so drunk and rowdy they kill and eat the only bull. Now Elvis has to find another bull (which can’t perform sexually, and Elvis sings a song about it) when he’s not trying to seduce an underage girl. “Stay Away, Joe” is ugly, insulting and gross, and somehow — and this is the only impressive part — it’s also boring.

30. “Double Trouble” (1967)

It turns out the girl Elvis Presley has been dating is underage — a plot point which happens twice, but twice too often in these movies — and he tries to ditch her as she chases him across Europe. Along the way they encounter a gang of assassins who wants one or both of them dead, for mysterious reasons. Presley made nine films with Oscar-winning director Norman Taurog, and this is the worst, despite some energetic direction and quality production design. The central “romance” is extremely creepy (and having Elvis sing “Old MacDonald” to his leading lady only makes it worse), but the film seems to think it’s whimsical and sweet. Yikes.

29. “Paradise, Hawaiian Style” (1966)

Presley’s third Hawaiian adventure starts off swimmingly, with Elvis playing an airline pilot who, in a subplot that’s supposed to make him sympathetic, has been fired from every airline for sexual harassment. So he travels to Hawaii and starts a helicopter transport service by manipulating every women he meets into thinking he’s their boyfriend in exchange for personal favors. It gets so bad his business partner, James Shigeta (“Die Hard”) has to ask single women who work for them to pretend they’re married, but Elvis knows. Somehow, he always knows. Lazy and episodic storytelling, even by Elvis-movie standards, and a protagonist who deserves his failures.

28. “Harum Scarum” (1965)

The idea of Presley playing a movie star who gets confused for the characters he plays on film is a clever one, and this film is determined to completely ruin it. Presley gets kidnapped in a regressive Middle Eastern country and forced to assassinate a local ruler, in a film which lets lots of white people play Arab roles (yikes) and romanticizes harems (double yikes), to the point that a little kid sings a song about how she dreams of being a glamorous, beautiful slave (all the yikes in the world). The film’s only saving grace is “So Close, Yet So Far (From Paradise),” a great song that Presley is unusually invested in at this point in his movie career. But you can hear that song without having to suffer the indignities of the film surrounding it.

27. “Wild in the Country” (1961)

Just before Presley settled down into a long, long series of programmatic fluff musicals, he took one more stab at serious acting with this unconvincing melodrama (from a screenplay by Clifford Odets). Presley plays a troubled young writing prodigy who tries to overcome his emotional issues with the help of a psychologist (Hope Lange, “Peyton Place”) who, naturally, falls in love with him. At least this movie knows when the romance is inappropriate. It all ends in a court case and life-or-death tragedy, and all of it is seedy, none of it works, and Presley is very much out of his acting wheelhouse the entire time.

26. “Easy Come, Easy Go” (1967)

Presley plays a Navy frogman who stumbles across a shipwreck full of treasure and schemes to steal it for himself, with a little help from a free-spirited dance enthusiast who lives at a wacky art commune. It’s kinda like “The Deep” if “The Deep” stank out loud, and if it had an absolutely bewildering musical number mercilessly making fun of yoga, with the great Elsa Lanchester on hand (all too briefly) to assist. The underwater footage is interminable — a marginal improvement on the footage that was shot on land.

25. “Roustabout” (1964)

Barbra Stanwyck had her final film role in a flick that’s drab and plotless even by Elvis-movie standards. The King stars as a big jerk who sings mean songs about his audience, including a group of 40-something frat boys, and then beats them up in the parking lot when they point out — reasonably so — that it wasn’t very nice. (One of his victims hilariously screams “No! No! That’s karate!”) Then Elvis nearly runs Stanwyck’s family off the road while trying seduce her daughter and blocking the highway. But when Presley’s motorcycle crashes, it’s up to Stanwyck to make it up to him (for some reason) by giving him a job at their failing carnival. Sure, he saves the day, but he never stops being a cad, and this movie never, ever picks up steam.

24. “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962)

This unimaginatively-named Presley vehicle barely registers as a motion picture. Elvis is trying to buy a boat in Hawaii, while the person who owns the boat would rather sell it to someone who has enough money to do so. So he takes on jobs to buy the boat, and eventually he gets that boat. Meanwhile, he balances a variety of women in his life who, mysteriously, all want to sleep with him, even though he literally cares only about boats. Somehow the iconic song “Return to Sender” came from this tedious drivel, even though it has literally nothing to do with the rest of the film.

23. “It Happened at the World’s Fair” (1963)

Elvis plays a crop duster who just happens to befriend a little girl whose uncle goes mysteriously missing at the World’s Fair. But instead of, you know, actually looking for him, the two of them conspire to hook Elvis up with a nurse who hates his guts. The songs are completely forgettable, and the plot isn’t forgettable enough. Historical footage of the fair aside, “It Happened at the World’s Fair” is noteworthy only for the scenes where a young Kurt Russell kicks Presley (who Russell would go on to play multiple times as an adult) in his highly vulnerable shins.

22. “Clambake” (1967)

Presley famously believed that “Clambake” was his worst movie, and while he wasn’t correct, his point is well taken. The King plays the heir to a gigantic oil-industry fortune who swaps places with a stranger, giving a regular Joe a taste of the good life while Elvis figures out if he can live without his money. Not the worst premise ever, but an insipid b-plot about Elvis alchemically mixing a miracle “Goop” to fix up a racing boat gets way too much screen time, and all the jokes — and the songs — uniformly fall flat.

21. “Kid Galahad” (1962)

This tepid remake of Michael Curtiz’s 1937 boxing drama (which originally starred Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart) finds Elvis working as a sparring partner who can take such a beating he wears out his opponents. Ostensibly there’s a crime element here, with his promoter (Gig Young) mired in debt to the mafia, but it plays out with all the gin-soaked, desperate tension of a Hayley Mills musical. Charles Bronson plays Presley’s coach, but he looks like he’d rather be in any other movie. Watchable, but utterly forgettable.

20. “Change of Habit” (1969)

In his final film as an actor, Presley plays Dr. John Carpenter (no relation), who runs a small clinic in Harlem. Mary Tyler Moore co-stars as a nun who, along with her fellow sisters, decide to go undercover as regular folks to make a positive impact on the neighborhood, and possibly to fall in love with Elvis at the same time. Noteworthy for being the first movie to openly discuss autism (even though it gets a whole lot of it wrong) and for Elvis playing an abortion doctor, the film features strong performances, but the film’s approach to sexual violence is unsettling, alternately the source of humor (yikes) and a climactic brutal attack that the film never recovers from (more yikes).

19. “Kissin’ Cousins” (1964)

It’s not just a title! Elvis stars as an Air Force pilot trying to convince his cousins in the Great Smokey Mountains to let the military construct a missile base on their land. Along the way he ends up in a love triangle with his two cousins, one of whom is played by the original Batgirl herself, Yvonne Craig. They are so closely related that their other relative looks like Presley’s identical twin. (Elvis played both, “Parent Trap”–style.) If you’re thinking that’s a tough sell, don’t worry, because this movie dedicates two (!) whole (!) songs (!) to Elvis saying it’s okay to date your cousins, with lyrics like “Kissing’s allowed because we’re proud to be cousins.” It’s bad, but it’s so flamboyantly bad it’s riveting.

18. “Live a Little, Love a Little” (1968)