Blue Hawaii: Elvis in shorts!

Tour Hawaii with Elvis Presley!!!

That should have been the tagline on the Blue Hawaii poster (instead of “Elvis Presley Rides the Crest of the Wave”). The 1961 musical is less a motion picture than a moving postcard, but it was the King’s biggest box-office hit, the eighth highest grossing film in the year of its release, and a still impressive number 14 the year after. Shockingly, the movie’s soundtrack, littered with the likes of “Ito Eats” and “Slicin’ Sand,” became his most popular album. The RCA Victor LP held down the number one spot on the Billboard chart for 20 weeks, a record that remained unbroken until Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors overtook it in 1977, the year of Presley’s death.

Like all of Presley’s films for Paramount, Blue Hawaii was produced by Hal Wallis. Unlike 1957’s Loving You and 1958’s King Creole which preserved if toned down his rebellious rocker image, Blue Hawaii gave us a tame Elvis that the whole family could safely see together. It would also provide the template for most of the Presley movies to come: a tropical location with lush scenery, bikini-clad cuties, and an LP’s worth of songs, some of them downright ghastly.

It may have represented the start of the downward spiral that Presley’s career would take in the mid-1960s, but Blue Hawaii has its supporters among the faithful. After all, this is the movie that introduced the lovely “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” the song that closed his concerts after he returned to live performing in 1969. The other songs are coated in too much sugar to compete with “Jailhouse Rock,” but they are agreeable in the movie’s setting. There’s also a good cast with Angela Lansbury on hand as Elvis’ mother even though, at age 35, she was only ten years his senior. If Lansbury doesn’t incite lust in the male audience, there are several luscious babes that should do the trick. There’s Joan Blackman for those who like brunettes and Jenny Maxwell for the gentlemen who prefer blondes.

Blue Hawaii is attractive, alright, but it’s also the very definition of fluff. Elvis still had the opportunity to show he had the dramatic chops for a serious acting career (Flaming Star, Wild in the Country), but Blue Hawaii’s massive success, along with his complacent attitude toward Colonel Parker’s mismanagement of his career, guaranteed that the few gems in his filmography would be outnumbered by the likes of Girl Happy, Clambake, and Paradise, Hawaiian Style. If nothing else, Blue Hawaii is the best of that lot.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Sorry, Wrong Number

Sorry, Wrong Number is a near perfect thriller, less so for Lucille Fletcher’s story (which is very good in itself) than for its atmosphere and mood.

With the aid of some fine camera work by Sol Polito, director Anatole Litvak captures the sense of lonely desolation that marks the lives of the characters quite well. At the center of it all is Barbara Stanwyck’s Leona Stevenson, the bed-ridden heiress who overhears a telephone conversation between two men plotting what she will discover is her own murder. Then there’s Burt Lancaster’s Henry Stevenson, whose anger that his marriage is thwarting his ambition leads him into a more dangerous trap when he agrees to arrange his wife’s murder so he can pay off his debts to the gangsters he has betrayed.

And there’s Harold Vermilyea's Waldo Evans, the chemist who becomes a drug thief, hoping the money can finance an idealized retirement on an English horse farm but instead plots his suicide to escape arrest by the police.

As in many noirs, flashbacks dominate Sorry, Wrong Number to suggest the characters have no escape from their fate. Many scenes are memorable for their visual qualities alone: the rain descending on the dark street when Henry Stevenson offers Waldo Evans a ride home, a gesture offered only to lure the chemist into his illegal scheme to steal drugs from his father-in-law’s company; the lonely beach on Staten Island where Sally Ford (the lovely Ann Richards) follows her detective husband to an abandoned house where the drug ring will be uncovered; the menacing shack is also the setting when Stevenson and Evans are confronted by Morano (William Conrad) and his men, the gangsters they betrayed by striking out on their own; and the darkened Manhattan hotel room from where Evans, seen only in silhouette, calls Leona and explains the events that are leading to her husband’s downfall.

The climactic murder is also imaginatively presented with the emphasis on the mystery more than the mayhem with a shadow ascending the long and winding staircase in the Stevenson home where the victim awaits in her bedroom.

A good show from start to finish.


© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock

Anthony Hopkins drawls his dialogue and wears a fat suit, but it’s not his fault that he sounds and looks nothing like Hitchcock, the legendary Master of Suspense.

Covering the period when the portly director was making 1960’s Psycho, you have to wonder how much is true and how much was fabricated by screenwriter John J. McLaughlin and director Sacha Gervasi. This is the stuff of a great documentary, but might require some tweaking for a dramatic film.

Based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, the film suggests that everything was at stake, including the revered director’s reputation, as he becomes fixated on making a low-budget, black-and-white shocker from Robert Bloch’s novel, inspired by the true story of killer Ed Gein. Paramount, the studio with which Hitchcock was aligned, had already issued Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, but studio head Barney Balaban was not pleased with Psycho’s grisly subject matter, and the studio agreed only to distribute the film providing Hitchcock financed it himself.

Some of the tweaking is kind of silly, such as having Gein’s ghost appearing to Hitchcock. It brings to mind True Romance in which Christian Slater gets helpful hints from the spirit of Elvis Presley. Since Elvis was probably at Paramount preparing for G.I. Blues at the time that Psycho was being edited, why wasn’t he given a cameo? He could have popped in to congratulate Anthony Perkins on his version of “Moonlight Swim” a song that the Psycho star had recorded (on one of several albums issued during his “teen idol” phase) which Elvis later covered in Blue Hawaii.

A lot of the drama relates to Hitchcock’s relationship with his wife, Alma, played by Helen Mirren. Was she having an affair with a hack screenwriter? Hitchcock suspects as much. Would she give her full support to Psycho? And what about Hitchcock’s weird obsession with his leading ladies, those cool blondes like Janet Leigh, very convincingly portrayed by Scarlett Johanssen, or Vera Miles (Jessica Biel), who he had been grooming for the lead in Vertigo, but who “betrayed” him by getting pregnant and choosing her family over stardom?

Hitchcock is good fun for film buffs, and, perhaps, a slice of movie history for the younger viewer, though some of what they’ll learn is not the truth. In the film, Hitchcock’s agent boasts that “I made a millionaire out of Jimmy Stewart with Winchester 73 and that film was a dog.” Hardly. Winchester 73, directed by Anthony Mann, is one of the great westerns, and, like his collaborations with Hitchcock, among Stewart’s best.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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Peter Falk and John Cassavettes as Mikey and Nicky

“Mikey, I’m in trouble,” Nicky (John Cassavettes) tells Mikey (Peter Falk) when calling him from the seedy hotel room in which he’s hiding out.

“I’m in trouble” should have been writer-director Elaine May's description of her situation concerning the 1976 film, Mikey and Nicky. May is said to have started the script in 1959, fourteen years before filming began in 1973. It spent several years in the editing room before Paramount released it, without hoopla, in December 1976. The movie never made it much beyond its initial New York engagement and was hard to find on television or video until Criterion put it out a few years back on DVD.

That title – Mikey and Nicky – doesn’t help. If your eyes quickly glance it in print, you might mistake Mikey for Mickey. After all, it rhymes with Nicky, and it’s famous as the name of that kid in the Life cereal commercial (“Give it to Mikey. He won’t eat it. He hates everything”).

Peter Falk plays Mikey who looks after his friend Nicky like a mother hen, though we later learn that that his motives have little to do with friendship. Arriving in Nicky’s hotel room and finding his friend disheveled and swearing that someone is out there waiting to kill him, Mikey takes him out to wander the streets. They ride the bus, stop at a theater to see a kung fu flick (which the theater marquee advertises as playing with The Laughing Policeman, a much better movie than this one), make a post-midnight visit to a cemetery, and ramble on in seemingly improvised dialogue.

Nicky is right. Someone is trying to kill him. Ned Beatty plays the hit man and we get occasional glimpses of him loading his gun, calling Nicky’s wife to learn his whereabouts, and, like the title characters, wandering about.

The dialogue is sometimes funny (“It’s very hard to talk to a dead person,” Nicky says when visiting his mother’s grave. “We have little in common”), but never meaningful enough to maintain interest.

Mikey and Nicky seems like little more than an excuse for Falk and Cassavettes to hang out together and let the viewer hang out with them. I always liked them both, but based on the evidence provided by Mikey and Nicky, their company was rather tedious without a decent script.

Brian W. Fairbanks

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks


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