The film opens in 1972 with a single mother and her two children running a boarding house. The mother is hurt in a car accident and hospitalized. As a birthday present, her son and his band drive her Pink Cadillac to Cleveland, Ohio to kidnap her favorite singer, Elvis Presley. He gets the owner of a local pizzeria, who looks eerily like Elvis' mother, to pose as his mother's ghost as a distraction, and then drugs Elvis with chloroform. Elvis awakens in the boarding house. He and the boy do not get along at first. The boy disrespects Elvis, accusing him of selling out to Vegas. However, the boy and Elvis get to know each other, and they became friends. The film concludes with Elvis playing "Heartbreak Hotel" with the boy's band at the high school talent show.
Cast
David Keith as Elvis Presley
Tuesday Weld as Marie Wolfe
Charlie Schlatter as Johnny Wolfe
Angela Goethals as Pam Wolfe
Reception
The film received mixed-to-negative reviews. It currently holds a 38% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 13 reviews. Janet Maslin of The New York Times stated that "Mr. Columbus, who previously directed Adventures in Baby-Sitting and whose writing credits include Gremlins and The Goonies, sets up this idea well but has no idea where to stop. He pushes the film's slender premise much too far, trying to work miraculous feats of self-improvement upon Johnny, his mother, Marie, and even Elvis himself." The Washington Post's Rita Kempley wrote, "With such fruity writing, what do overacting and miscasting matter? Playing Elvis is like playing a Kennedy, nearly impossible. And Keith, as we know, had mighty big pants to fill. Face it. The King has left the building, gone to that Caesars Palace in the sky. Columbus, say goodbye." A one-star review came from Roger Ebert who wrote, "Here it is, the goofiest movie of the year, a movie so bad in so many different and endearing ways that I’m damned if I don’t feel genuine affection for it. We all know it’s bad manners to talk during a movie, but every once in a while a film comes along that positively requires the audience to shout helpful suggestions and lewd one-liners at the screen. 'Heartbreak Hotel' is such a movie. All it needs to be perfect is a parallel soundtrack." It was also a box office failure, opening with a disappointing $2,063,546 from 1,338 screens, finishing in second place behind Gorillas in the Mist, despite opening on more than double the number of screens. It went on to gross $5.5 million in the United States and Canada.
Music
Most of the songs contained in the film are actual Elvis Presley recordings despite the film being fictional, with David Keith and Charlie Schlatter performing the title track in the style of the 1968 television special recording.
