Fun In Acapulco (1963, Richard Thorpe)

This late in Hal Wallis's formulaic musical-comedies as a serious business, there was no question that he was in it for the money.  The Beatles, who happened to catch a screening of Fun In Acapulco at a Miami drive-in on their first U.S. tour, later asked Elvis, when they met him in 1965, if he was working on new ideas for his next movie.  "I sure am. I play a country boy with a guitar who meets a few gals along the way, and I sing a few songs."  He and the Colonel laughed before explaining to John Lennon that the only time they strayed from this formula (Wild In The Country), they lost money.

This, of course, is gross hyperbole.  Wild In The Country was a modest success, but considered a "loss" compared to the money that could be made with pictures like G.I. Blues.  In fact, no Elvis movie ever lost money.  Think about that for a second. 

Yet, the Hal Wallis budget began to cheapen with Girls! Girls! Girls!, and Fun In Acapulco is bad teen exploitation filmed in front of bad blue screen.  As films shot in tropical locations that border on travelogues, Wallis often skimped on quality.  Fun In Acapulco looks like a skeleton crew drove around Acapulco for a couple of days to gather enough footage to superimpose Elvis in front of in the Hollywood studio.  The bad matting would become a standard (Paradise, Hawaiian Style, Speedway), but perhaps part of what made It Happened At The World's Fair look so good is that (with a different producer) Elvis was actually there.

No, just as the Colonel never wanted Elvis to leave the States, Presley never visited Acapulco.  The soft lighting and (again) prevalent makeup are particularly unconvincing in a film that routinely offers striking establishing shots of native color, only to thwart it in the closeup. 

Elvis's Mike Windgren is an American working on a boat, but quickly loses his job when his boss's bratty, underage daughter throws him under the bus after he turns down her come-ons.  It's a real double standard in Presley films-- women are vilified for coming on to Elvis too strongly as it costs him his job.  However, when Elvis's characters come on too strongly (say for instance, when he refuses to take no for an answer and is walked in on by the girl's parents early in It Happened At The World's Fair), the threat of a girl's lost honor is played for laughs.  Worse, Mike refuses the girl on grounds of age (she later gets busted with alcohol), which is fine and noble until the camera sexualizes her as she passes by low-angle in a bikini.  The bread and butter of many an Elvis picture involves pairing Elvis with a too-young teenage girl, if only for a moment, as a sort of relatable fantasy for the demographic.

But it was these same movies that began making Elvis passe, and this isn't the only instance in which Fun In Acapulco seems out of touch.  Much of the soundtrack seems to capitalize on the Herb Alpert phenomenon which probably spoke to someone about ten years older than the film's target audience.  As much as I love the mental image of the Fab Four crammed into a car watching this movie at the drive-in, it speaks volumes that when it was Sérgio Mendes and Brasil '66 covering "Day Tripper" three years later, it wasn't beach party material.  And they wouldn't have (just as Elvis wouldn't have in 1966) gotten anywhere near the A Hard Day's Night treatment.

Mike does meet a few girls along the way (Elsa Cárdenas as a female matador, and Ursula Andress, a social director at the hotel which employs him).  The narrative gains nothing by Mike splitting his time between the two love interests.  Besides, he's got enough on him mind, brooding about his trouble past.  Mike has a fear of heights because of an accident as a trapeze artist he feels responsible for.  The number of shots of Elvis green-screened on a diving board with an over-acted troubled shake of the head is staggering.  The climax builds, not so much as a decision between the two women or a conflict coming to a head between Mike and his rival (Alejandro Rey), but in Mike facing his fear.  The measure of a man in Fun In Acapulco isn't committing to a monogamous relationship, but a death-defying 136-foot cliff dive.  Any rush from this film lasts about as long.

The charm injected into the tame story comes in the form of Mike's eight-year-old "agent", Raoul (Larry Domasin).  The joke is that this orphan has "cousins" all over town.  He wheels and deals, getting Mike a job as lifeguard and nightclub singer.  His songs have a distinct Latin flavor which seems hypocritical considering he pronounces Raoul's name "Ral".  Adding children to the musical-comedy formula was a success in It Happened At The World's Fair (and to a lesser degree in Blue Hawaii), and the Raoul character feels equally contrived.  Domasin's performance is winning, but it's over-the-top saccharine and he emotes one-dimensionally.  A tongue-in-cheek segment features Raoul raising Mike's value by playing two different club owners before demanding 50% of his cut.  "You get half?  That's kinda high for an agent's commission," Elvis answers before increasing Colonel Parker's cut to fifty percent.

Fun In Acapulco isn't.  If it was, Elvis might have been there himself.  Unlike Follow That Dream, the film is inane as well as offensive.  Worse, neither appears to be intentional. -- */four stars


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It Happened At The World's Fair (1963, Norman Taurog)

It Happened At The World's Fair is a showcase of the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle, Washington thanks to then governor Albert Rosellini's suggestion to MGM.  As such, a lot of it plays like newsreel: extended shots up the Space Needle, a showcase of the monorail, and other fair attractions that serve no other narrative purpose.  The titular "it" in question is a bit of a mystery as three circumstantial storylines surrounding Elvis's Mike Edwards don't really converge (nor in some instances, resolve.)

Mike and his crop-dusting buddy, compulsive-gambler Danny (Gary Lockwood) hitchhike to Seattle after their plane is confiscated due to gambling debts.  While there, Mike plays babysitter to a young Chinese girl, Sue-Lin (Vicky Tiu, the third Tiu sister in two consecutive Elvis films) who gets separated from her uncle, and at the same time snakes his way into a relationship with a nurse at the fair, Diane Warren (Joan O'Brien).

Sue-Lin immediately (and rather inexplicably) takes a shine to Mike, calling him the nicest man she's ever known.  Strange, as Elvis's characters become increasingly unlikable as the his films progress.  Women exist, largely, to fulfill any need Mike might have.  No matter if it interferes with a woman's honest work through charlatanism, that's the least of Mike's infractions.  In an opening scene riffing North By Northwest, Mike swoops his plane down dangerously low to the ground to check out women, immediately dismissing the "one in the red dress" whose "ankles are a little thick" (a strange erratum as, not only is neither girl overweight, neither is wearing a red dress).  Worse than mere objectification, Mike later guffaws at Dianne "it must give a girl like you a wonderful feeling to know she can do something useful" when he learns she has applied for a job in the government space medicine program.  The Elvis musical-comedy formula is never a matter of the woman setting the man straight-- the film never allows for any culpability on our hero's part.  In fact, Dianne is painted the villain for (supposedly) calling child protective services when Sue-Lin is living in a trailer with two unrelated bachelors, one of whom being dangerously drunk.

Instead the film tries to make Mike the likable hero by sticking him with an adorable little girl (who has the savvy to help his courtship, unbeknownst to either of the two parties involved), and by partnering him up with an even worse male.  Danny gets involved in illegal gambling rackets, runs his mouth off as a drunk (despite the bar setting in many an Elvis movie, Elvis is never inebriated), and his plan to avoid financial ruin involves running illegal furs, almost getting Sue-Lin shot.  Any real-life red flags that would go up involving the character Mike keeps is shooed away in the musical-comedy.

The film is an odd affair; as calculated as ever, the songs come every ten minutes and have little to do with the narrative.  And they don't even try to hide it.  The musical is also guilty of some of my favorite anachronisms: people pretending to play musical instruments, songs appearing to be played naturally though they contain more instrumentation than pictured, and songs fading out while being performed.  To make it even more surreal, Elvis is wearing a lot of noticeable makeup throughout the picture, and when Mike and Dianne sing a song about happy endings as the closing credits come up, we wonder what they are talking about:  last we could tell, Mike and Danny never got their plane back.

The songs are merely adequate, and, like much of It Happened At The World's Fair, are forgettable but never overtly insulting.  The package is wrapped up a little too neatly considering we're left with more questions than answers, but as is the case with the streamlined Elvis affair, his charisma carries the character flaws.  The commercial for Seattle bears higher production values than many of the Wallis pictures that came before and after this Ted Richmond production, and while Elvis Orphans tend to be obnoxious in these pictures, the adorable Vicky Tiu is much more winning.  The film does little to sidestep the formula that was becoming apparent in Presley's musicals, but, if for nothing more than the change of locale, It Happened At The World's Fair is one of the more likable of the lightweights.  -- **/four stars


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Hud (1963, Martin Ritt)

Hud is not really a Western.  Sure, it takes place in Texas and Paul Newman pokes some cattle, but there is a change in the frontier.  We're not moving west to fulfill our manifest destiny; in fact, there is nothing to fulfill.  Hud takes place at the end of an age: one that looks upon the past with a deep, ephemeral nostalgia.  Classic Western trope shares the mindset of many of Bruce Springsteen's characters: while the good ol' boys may butt heads with impending mechanization, even the letter of the law-- however perverted in its minutia-- doesn't stray too far in its intent from their grounded values of honor and sacrifice.  At the end of the day, a torch still burns, fueled by a rear-view optimism.

In Hud, the torch is extinguished and all the world is ash.  Hud is a parable of manifest destiny imploding on itself: the vast expanses don't represent freedom and glory, but foreboding and treachery.  A worldview has shifted in Paul Newman's Hud Bannon:  man, in all his least-common-denominator path of achieving carnal desires through lack of discipline, has becomes the measure of all things and "the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner," so long as its his.  Even his father Homer (the brilliant Melvyn Douglas), a man of deep principle, approaches death's door on his hands and knees on a dirt road in the black of night.  Stuck in the middle is Hud's nephew Lonnie (Brandon De Wilde, once doe-eyedly seeking a savior in Shane), who concedes with a whimper that the old man is not in a better place, "not unless dirt is a better place than air."  If his resolve weren't bleak enough, it is all the more devastating that Hud's antagonist was embraced as counter-culture anti-hero and De Wilde's own life ended like James Dean's.

If Cormac McCarthy yens for this same nostalgia with a postmodern bent anigh to nihilism in No Country For Old Men, Larry McMurtry (author of Horseman, Pass By, upon which Hud was based, as well as the similarly-themed The Last Picture Show) won't succumb without a fighting chance.  And as such, can be unabashedly preachy in a film full of memorable monologues.  One of Homer's cows dies of foot-and-mouth disease and, like Job, his entire fold and livelihood must be exterminated.  Hud suggests he quickly pawn the herd off up north, out of sight, out of mind, washing his hands of any epidemic that might ensue.  As Homer defies such irresponsibility, Hud becomes increasingly reproachable, going so far as to try to declare Homer legally incompetent in order to secure his own inheritance.

For Hud, looking out for number one has become a bondage he can't shake.  "If you don't look out for yourself," he informs us early on, "the only helping hand you'll ever get is when they lower the box."  The alienated anti-hero accepts death as the outcome, but fails to see that his reaction to it informs his emptiness.  The film's central metaphor relates the emptiness of Hud's existence to the infected cattle.  Hud is a parasite who takes what he wants ("The only question I ever ask any woman is 'What time does your husband come home?'"), by force if necessary.  Homer's housekeeper Alma (Patricia Neal, in an Oscar-winning performance) falls victim to Hud's drunken demands-- a man to whom his family has become but a stumbling block.  There is no relationship for Hud, and he wouldn't have it any other way.  In a world where "you don't value nothing," everything is worthless.  Hud is the answer to everything in Hud, and everything is morally gray and sparse.  The striking cinematography and minimalist score brilliantly follow suit.

No, Hud is no Western.  Even where revisionist additions to the genre question the tropes of honor and manhood, there is not revision without "vision".  Newman's Hud, in fragile moments, waxes nostalgic about his dead mother and brother before drinking away the memory.  It tragically reminds of Patricia Neal's series of strokes that hit her in 1965, rendering memory problems when she returned to the screen.  The Western is a genre of memory, Hud is a story of forced forgetfulness; a cautionary if unashamed tale of the price one pays in refusing the cost of love.  Paul Newman's rebellious on-screen persona makes it look effortless, but its a Greek tragedy whose antagonist abides alone in a self-made prison and, conversely, whose good men are helpless against entropy.  Not, however, without submitting to a higher standard.  -- ****/four stars

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