Pretty early in Kid Galahad I thought, “Could they have called this movie ‘One Hit Wonder?’”  

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Let me explain. 

Elvis plays Walter Gulick, a soldier just back from, no, not Europe. Okinawa, smarty pants. He arrives in the small town of Cream Valley, New York, literally on the lift gate of a moving truck, singing “The King Of The Whole Wide World,” and wearing the same uniform from G.I Blues and Blue Hawaii, minus the patches. He’s there to look for a mechanic job in the town where he was born. He doesn’t get that job, but gets offered a job as a sparring partner for a local boxer that has a habit of knocking guys out during training. Walter steps in the ring with him, gets punched in the face more often and realistically than you’d expect for an Elvis movie, and then finds some motivation and, Bam! One hit and the guy is out cold. One Hit Wonder, see?*

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The guy that sets him up for the sparring job is Willy Grogan. He runs a local inn and is a boxing promoter with a bad gambling habit that owes every bookie around money. Willy’s sister Rose (Joan Blackman,  recycled from Blue Hawaii, like the GI uniform) comes from the big city to check up on why the inn and boxing gym that she’s 50% partner in is losing money even though it’s always booked solid. Also in from the big city are a mob guy named Otto Danzig and a couple of thugs, there to make sure Willy doesn’t spill the beans on some information he has on them. 

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Willy sees his way out of debt when Walter knocks out the best boxer in town. He also knocks out one of the thugs when the guy tries to get fresh with Willy’s girlfriend Dolly, earning him the nickname Galahad. Willy sets up Walter, now known as Kid Galahad, with a series of fights. Time after time, Galahad takes a brutal beating for a while, then comes around and knocks out the opponent with one punch.  One. Hit. Wonder.

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Between fights, Walter/ Galahad courts Rose, which leads to a few good songs, notably “This is Living”** and “I Got Lucky.”*** He also gets trained by Lew, who is played by Charles Bronson. Ed Asner shows up briefly as a district attorney. Howard NcNear is nowhere to be found, much to my dismay.

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Elvis is back in a role that’s similar to Toby from Follow That Dream, but it kind of falls flat. He a likable good old boy without a mean bone in his body, but he doesn’t really have much personality. In fact, the whole movie doesn’t either. 

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This is a movie with boxing and the mob and gambling and a love story, but really, not much tension or drama.**** Pretty early on, we find out Galahad can fight. Then he does, and he just keeps winning. There’s a love story, but they just kind of meet and hit it off and it just works. They decide to get married and go to talk to the priest. The priest is surprised to find out that Walter was born in Cream Valley, and says he’s going to need to look into it. Nothing comes of it.

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Even at the end when there’s a big fight that the mob guys are trying to rig, they don’t try to bribe Galahad to take a fall. Instead they try to bribe his cut man, Lew, to not take care of his cuts so he bleeds too much and the fight gets stopped. That’s their big plan? At least that leads to Charles Bronson throwing their money in their faces. 

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So it goes til the big fight. Guess who wins.

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One crazy thing about Kid Galahad. It is IMPOSSIBLE to find it streaming anywhere in America at any price. I actually had to stream it from a Russian video site. 

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ACTING: 6 Elvises 

MUSICAL PERFORMANCES: 7 Elvises

BEST SONG: Tough call. “King Of The Whole Wide World” or “This Is Living”

STUNTS: Boxing, boxing, and more boxing. Also boxing.

CRINGE FACTOR: Mexican opponent Ramon “Sugarboy” Romero is kind of a caricature 

KISSIN’: A couple 

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*I had to stop and look One Hit Wonder up, and sure enough, it wasn’t used in the musical sense until the 1970s. Before that it was used for baseball pitchers. 

**Steve “Lucky” Marshall just picked “This Is Living” to do with Little Elvis, whenever we can get back together.

***At this point the writers of these movies don’t even to explain why Elvis’s characters bust into songs. He just does, ok?

****Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” breaks down the seventeen stages that a character must pass through to overcome adversity to become a hero. Kid Galahad ignores about fifteen of them. It’s got the Call To Adventure, the Meeting With The Goddess (kinda, maybe?) and finally the Freedom To Live. Who needs the Refusal Of The Call, The Road Of Trials, Atonement With The Father, and Apotheosis? Those all sound hard to write.