Elvis Presley needs a red hot single to regain his former superiority over other artists in the record markets of the world.

His new one, Viva Las Vegas, certainly isn’t the one to change the Beatles’ tune. It’s just another boring song from another of Elvis’s boring conveyor-belt produced movies.

When I go to a Presley film now I can’t help feeling I’ve seen it before, and the same goes for this record. The coupling is quite a good work-out on What’d I Say, the Ray Charles standard, but Elvis could do so much better.

[From the Watford Observer of March 13, 1964]

NOSTALGIA NOTE: The film Viva Las Vegas (renamed Love in Las Vegas in the UK as there was another film called Viva Las Vegas doing the rounds at the time) is these days regarded one of Presley’s best. However it wasn’t only the Watford Observer’s reviewer who wasn’t impressed at the time. Other reviews were lukewarm including Variety magazine which called it “trite”. It still made nearly ten million dollars at the box office though.

For more stories from the Watford Observer's archive, go to our Nostalgia section by clicking HERE