"You better stick to singing," Sammy Jackson, one of the two male leads of The Fastest Guitar Alive tells his partner. "I don't think you've got much future as a spy." It turned out that hardly anybody connected with this movie had much of a future except for Jackson's sidekick--Roy Orbison, who, as it turned out, did stick to singing. The movie, which coincided with the start of a long career slump for the most beautifully masochistic of white rock crooners, was Roy's one fling at movie acting. In this Civil War-era Western, he plays the performing half of a team of snake oil salesman and saloon entertainers who ride from town to town hauling a wagon full of dancing girls. Sammy pitches his miracle elixir and serves as manager to Roy, who hits the stage at the local watering hole and sings the songs written specially for the movie, such as the Marty Robbins knockoff "Pistolero", the Ren-and-Stimpyesque "Happy Party Time" ("Have a good time party,dance the night away/ Have a good time party,it's time to laugh and play") , and "Snuggle Huggle" (" I want to be as snuggle as a buggle in a ruggle/ When my sweety does the snuggle huggle with me"), which was deemed to hot for inclusion on the soundtrack album. This serves as their cover while they go about trying to break into the U.S. mint to steal gold to help fund the Confederate state. The title itself refers to Roy's special guitar, which is also a secret weapon; when he plucks a particular string, a long, thin gun barrell slowly emerges from the side--an image whose unintentionally hilarious phallic overtones are not helped by the funny sound effect that accompanies it. Shooting an interloper's hat off just to get his attention, Roy warns him, "If you're interested, I could kill you with this, and play your funeral march at the same time."
Roy doesn't actually kill anyone; we're repeatedly informed that, despite the fair amount of fancy shooting he does, he somehow "couldn't" use his fast guitar for to lay anyone out permanently. The movie also features a tribe of Borsht-Belt-style Indians (including Iron Eyes Cody, the Italian-American actor who specialized in pretending to be Native American, and who starred in the iconic public service announcement whose message was, "People start pollution--people can stop it!") who might have been run off the set of F Troop. When they get wind that Roy and company are passing through, they ready to attack, though just before they mount up we hear Cody say, "We'll just give 'em a good scare, not hurt 'em, huh Chief?" Maybe because it took its cues from Orbison's innate gentleness--he must have radiated less natural rebelliousness than anyone else who ever stopped for a cup of coffee at Sun Studios--Fastest Guitar keeps declaring how undangerous it is. Even the fact that the heroes are spying for the Rebels during the Civil War-- a choice that may have been dictated by the thickness of Orbison's country-fried accent--is treated as just one of those fluky things; they never talk about the pros or cons of either side in the conflict, but they're overjoyed at the end when they learn that the South has surrendered, just so they can stop running around and settle down.
Fastest Guitar was directed by Michael D. Moore--no connection to that Fahrenheit 9/11 fellow--who had just started his nothing-much directing career a year earlier with the Elvis Presley picture Paradise, Hawaiian Style. As little as he (and most other movie directors) got out of Elvis, he didn't get much more out of Orbison; resplendent in a gleaming black pompadour and with more costume changes than La Streisand on a good night, Roy walks through in a good-natured way, as if he had no idea what these movie people wanted of him but didn't have the heart to tell them to leave him alone after they were nice enough to come looking for him and offer him the role. (Sometimes he absently looked to his left and right in between saying his lines, as if he'd just registered that the camera was on and wanted to see what they were filming.) His presence gives this tacky, motorless musical Western a trace of sweetness that it wouldn't otherwise have, but he's so out of his element that it's pretty funny that it would turn out to be a movie--Blue Velvet, with its instant-classic scene of Dean Stockwell lip-synching "In Dreams"--that would unexpectedly revive his career twenty years later. The Fastest Guitar Alive was eventually released on VHS, and the soundtrack has been issued on CD, but both are now out of print, and no DVD release is in sight (though it turns up about once every couple of years on Turner Classic Movies). Which is fine, really. It's the kind of theoretical-cult movie that's a straight drag to actually watch but can be a blast to see immortalized on the Internet.