After his famed '68 Comeback Special, Elvis Presley vowed that all his future songs and films would come from the heart, and his next musical project was the amazing 1969 Memphis sessions, which produced his best music since his Sun Studios debut. Presley's next cinematic project: Change Of Habit, which found him "in the ghetto," playing a doctor at a neighborhood clinic. Mary Tyler Moore co-stars as the leader of three gung-ho nurse-nuns who go undercover in a troubled inner-city neighborhood. Moore proclaims that a nun's habit is "a symbol of authority, like a policeman's uniform," so she and her companions suggestively strip (to the accompaniment of Presley's title song), then head for their new assignment at Dr. Presley's clinic. After interrupting some neighborhood music enthusiasts who are holding a jam session beneath a peace sign, the nurses meet their new boss. Their initial surprise at finding a guitar-slinging doctor is matched by Presley's suspicions that his new charges won't be tough enough for ghetto-style nursing. (Recalling his last batch of nurses, he says, "Two of 'em got raped. One against her will.") But Moore, feisty radical Jane Elliot, and ghetto escapee Barbara McNair quickly prove him wrong. Elliot begins by protesting outrageous prices at the local market, while McNair, after a few run-ins with a Black Power contingent, begins taking on a loan shark known only as The Banker (Robert Emhardt). This leaves Moore to handle the lion's share of the nursing, much of which involves tending to a speechless girl named Amanda (Lorena Kirk, in her only screen role). After discovering that Kirk isn't deaf, Presley asks if she might be autistic. "Nah, she don't even pick up a crayon," Kirk's guardian replies, leading Presley to employ the radical technique of rage-reduction therapy. In a sequence that the credits reveal was overseen by Dr. Robert W. Zaslow, Presley clutches Kirk to his chest while repeating, "I'm gonna hold you until you get rid of all your hate. Try and get away from me, baby. I love you, Amanda. Don't you like it when people love you? I wanna see you get as mad as you can get. Get all that hate out of you." After many hours, his patient says her first word: "Mad." Eventually, a romance begins to flower between Presley and the still-undercover Moore, and the sexual tension reaches a boiling point when she reveals her secret identity shortly before a neighborhood celebration of San Juan De Chequez (the patron saint of Caribbean fishermen). Presley short-circuits Emhardt's attempts to sabotage the fiesta, then stops a troubled young patient from raping Moore, which leaves her with a difficult choice: The King, or the King Of Kings? In an ambiguous finale, she watches Presley lead a musical folk service as her gaze darts between the doctor/singer and the surrounding iconography. Jesus or Elvis? Elvis or Jesus? Change Of Habit leaves her choice tantalizingly unclear.
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