Blue Hawaii (1961, Norman Taurog)

It's strange to me that Blue Hawaii, the master film that would be carbon copied for the remainder of Presley's musical-comedy days, is so weightless.  Not only is the film devoid of any consequence or conflict, not much really even happens.  It's like a mumblecore film with songs and people you don't mind actually looking at.

Elvis's Chad Gates is a G.I. returning from "war" (as his mother Sarah Lee Gates (Angela Lansbury) refers to it so to not think he "wasted two years") to Hawaii where he can pick his life back up on the shore.  It begins as a much more interesting tale of arrested development (one that his film career would double as) than the film lets play out (Chad's loyal girlfriend Maile Duval (Joan Blackman) argues "you can't spend the rest of your life on a surfboard' to which Chad responds, "sure I can.  The G.I. Bill of Rights says I get my old job back.  This is my old job.")  There's still a rebel streak in America's new, clean-cut Elvis, but now he only gets into barroom brawls to stand up for underage girls, and the issue his has with his parents revolves around not wanting to be crammed into their box.  Sarah Lee has big plans for her son: to follow in his father's footsteps at the pineapple plant.  Only Chad wants to become his own man.  And does, able to keep his friendship with the beach bums and forge a new career as Hawaiian tour guide.  For the remainder of the film, Chad escorts a young schoolteacher and four teenage girls around the islands. 

Blue Hawaii is a film of scenery (of both the geographic and the female types), and it is a wonder that girls went for this in 1961.  In the opening minutes, Chad is seen locking lips with a stewardess as he disembarks the plane, in plain view of his girlfriend.  Maile then pouts for a moment, before quickly forgiving him, so Chad sings to her "I've been almost always true" a somehow acceptable consolation from G.I.s (or at least Elvis).  Maile then tries on a bikini Chad purchased for her in France; a gift for which Chad admits "oh, I wasn't thinking of you.  I was thinking of me."  Worse, the mother figure is beyond overbearing (when she asks her husband where they went wrong, he answers "offhand, I'd say we got married"-- it's one of the films few intentional gags that doesn't involve people falling into the water or getting sprayed with a hose, and one that would be the beginning of a trend in Elvis films that often trivializes women's desires.)  Worse yet?  Chad rebukes a bratty 17-year-old with a private spanking that, though under the pretense of caring with discipline, she clearly enjoys.  It's odd that in a film franchise so marketed toward girls that this belittlement was accepted. 

And it would be accepted for years to come.  The formula would sometimes change the exotic locale (Fun In Acapulco), and many would end in a wedding-- though it is strange: unlike screwball comedy in which the unlikely pair change just enough to make it work, Blue Hawaii ends with Maile accepting Chad's proposal though nothing has changed.  It is Maile who got over her petty jealousy, while Elvis's Chad comes across as blameless and unchanged.  If ever a film attempts to subtly subdue women, Blue Hawaii is it. 

From Here To Monotony

For a decade that saw Elvis's musical significance wane to nigh insignificant before the '68 Comeback, the soundtrack to Blue Hawaii still became the 26th best-selling album of the 1960s.  No small feat in that many of the tracks ("Aloha Oe", "Ku-U-I-Po", "Ito Eats", etc.) are non-traditional Elvis rockers and are very film (setting, not narrative) specific.

Blue Hawaii is a mostly pleasant (though not harmless) rollick with no consequence, no stake.  It is strange that this is the formula that stuck, but then again, it's not too dissimilar from the formulaic franchises we see today aimed at both women (Sex and the City) and men (The Fast and the Furious).  Of course it is of little consolation, but the relatively vapid Blue Hawaii (and even its followers) seems intelligent by today's inane franchise standards.  -- **/four stars

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Wild In The Country (1961, Philip Dunne)

If the dramatic pull of Elvis's role in Flaming Star was no match for the musical numbers in G.I. Blues, it's no wonder that his last dramatic role for nigh a decade in Wild In The Country paled in comparison to the success of Blue Hawaii.  If early Hollywood Elvis sought to be the next James Dean, Wild In The Country was his Rebel Without A Cause.  And also a fair bit like East of Eden, as Wild In The Country explores such similar territory as classism, loss of a mother, an incongruous generational gap, and a bit too much melodrama.

Elvis plays Glenn Tyler, a character not too dissimilar from King Creole's Danny Fisher.  Glenn comes from the wrong side of the tracks, lacks the proper schooling to get him where he'd like to be, lost his supportive mother earlier in his youth and lives under a deadbeat father who doesn't understand him.  After injuring his drunken brother in a brawl, his father wants him locked up, but the law has sympathy toward Glenn and allows him to live with his uncle, provided he begin psychological therapy with mother-figure Irene Sperry (Hope Lange).

The screenplay is brought to us by Clifford Odets, a playwright who is no stranger to heavy melodrama.  His own Clash By Night vents bile for a good length of its story (credit Fritz Lang for giving the screenplay legs), his guns-a-blazin' moral indictments The Big Knife and Sweet Smell of Success have their flair for the dramatic (broken homes and suicide, respectively) and he even wrote the screenplay for something called Humoresque, which I imagine is a misnomer.  So no surprise here when Glenn, a troubled youth, finds his true calling in-- wait for it-- creative writing!

On top of his tortured family history, a love triangle isn't enough for Glenn to deal with; it becomes something of a love rhomboid with trouble at each corner.  Millie Perkins plays Glenn's childhood sweetheart (and simply backwoods sounding) Betty Lee Parsons who, though sweet, represents something of a glass ceiling for Glenn: at best he would end up middle-America if he could survive the "Down In The Boondocks" curse Betty Lee's family won't let him forget.  Tugging the tether from the opposite side is Glenn's cousin, Noreen (Tuesday Weld), an equally troubled and world-weary teen mother.  Her father (Glenn's uncle) gives Glenn a job at his distillery.  Moonshine is a signature cliché that reminds us his prospects on this side of town would be even lower.

Tellingly, Glenn falls in love, instead with the older, most supportive motherly character, counselor Irene Sperry.  Even more Oedipal than his work in Flaming Star, there is no question that the instances in which Presley is most affecting in Wild In The Country are due to the recent loss of his mother.  The drama gets out of hand-- an attempted suicide, a slander, a death and false accusation of an affair conclude in a scene that can only be settled in an over-wrought courtroom.

My problems with the screenplay aren't with the inflated melodrama-- the experienced cast makes it, usually, effective-- but with the thesaurusness and forced local color of the writing.  In a screenplay re-worked to be about creative writing, it is grating to hear dialogue like "she says that she'll have me any way: plain, fried or scrambled" and "I thought you were supposed to help me ma'am, not rile me up like a muddy creek: take my life and twist it into something you want" in Elvis's extended diatribes, music set to swell, reminding us that this talk is weighty.

But it is a film that survives despite the drama weighing it down.  Perhaps the end is naïvely optimistic in Glenn's taking of the "third route" to college, but there is something triumphant in his ascension of the steps as he reaches university, and something even more powerful in the longing in the eyes of the women he left behind.  Wild In The Country is a film whose success is in its performances, surviving the drama they needed to wade through, like a muddy creek. -- ***/four stars


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