Change of Habit

Elvis tried something different in his final narrative movie… but the results are oddly similar to his usual '60s formula. Here the King plays a doctor working in an inner-city free clinic, playing host to three Catholic nurses (who are really nuns incognito). Elvis gets hung up on one of the nuns, played by Mary Tyler Moore; she seems a lot closer to The Dick Van Dyke Show than the Vatican. The songs are sparse--"Rubberneckin'" gets a workout in one of those awful stilted hootenannies so prevalent in Elvis pictures. The flower-power ambience is more interesting than the story; the film features Mod Squad-style attempts at racial politics, a sit-down protest, and a weird sequence involving "rage reduction" to cure an autistic child. Elvis has good scenes and indifferent ones, but he looks fantastic (this is just after the great "comeback"), and he dresses like no other doctor before or since. --Robert Horton