“Observe the neatness and precision of the grape fields.” Best line of movie dialogue, ever, from Juliet Prowse as “Lili,” 700 feet up in a cable car over the Main River with Tulsa McLean (Elvis) in “G. I. Blues.”
I take you back to 1960 when Elvis Presley was a worldwide celebrity, a young man in the Army, and there was a draft. He was still very cool.
What country was that? Not America in 2016, that’s for sure. A pop star with an album that went number 1, serving in the military in the endless war? Hahahahahahahahahaha. Where are you from? The Oort Cloud?
Fifty-six years ago on a planet far away, where the US military isn’t a nightmarish global Wehrmacht hovering overhead as a technology-enabled bludgeon, Elvis did a light-hearted movie about GIs looking for fun and love in Frankfurt. And despite a desire to make money on a seedy bet as to who can bed “ice queen” club dancer Lili, in the end, everyone does the right thing. There’s no John Paul Vann in Saigon-like behavior in sight. (Look it up.)
While it’s a farce with plenty of hokum and over-acting, it’s still a warm story. Juliet Prowse dances less but is sexier and more elegant than Ann Margaret would be years later. And “G.I. Blues” is worlds better than “Viva Las Vegas,” and above the solid happy mediocrity of “Roustabout.”
You’d recognize the soundtrack cover in an instant and the music is pretty good to great, from “Shoppin’ Around” to the title track and a restaurant serenade to Prowse, “Tonight is So Right for Love.” “Wooden Heart” with Elvis acting out in a puppet show is especially dear.
N.b.: The most modern American love farce/musical fully supported by the US military that I can think of? Top Gun. Seriously. Think about it. Not as good as GI Blues, though, not even close.
“Live a Little, Love a Little:” It’s 1968, released the same year as the dog’s breakfast, “Speedway.” And Elvis and his handlers still have no idea what to do in the face of the British invasion.
Inexplicably, “Live a Little, Love a Little” isn’t wretched. In fact, it’s serviceable Elvis semi-romantic comedy. And while on the subject of a dog’s breakfast, there’s an acting K9, Albert the Great Dane, who steals a number of scenes.
Elvis is Greg Nolan, a photographer, who rides his beach buggy (a VW chassis with an idiotic orange plexiglas body, remember the Bradley kits?) into the clutches of “Bernice,” a character who could easily have played “Evelyn” in “Play Misty for Me.”
Bernice has Albert drive Elvis into the surf where he suffers hypothermia. Back at her house, she drugs him unconscious for three days. When he recovers he discovers he’s been fired by his newspaper employer who inexplicably has the pressman crew beat him up. When you were fired at the newspaper, didn’t they beat you senseless?
Forced to move in with Bernice, Elvis lands two jobs on two floors of the same building, one as a soft porn photographer, the other as the photo editor in charge of a high button agency run by an aged Rudy Vallee.
The movie veers between Elvis running the stairs, juggling work and trying to avoid becoming weird Bernice’s prey. Dick Sargent, who always played an affable clown, does decent work as Bernice’s ex-husband, a wealthy man who keeps her financed. In the interstices between the farces, Albert barks, whines, growls and threatens to bite when necessary.
There’s an EP’s worth of music of little account. But “Wonderful World,” a gay throwaway which opens the movie, sets the tone as Elvis goes histrionic in its last 20 seconds. Definitely an oddity for his then moribund reputation.
It’s 1964 and the Beatles have made Elvis virtually irrelevant. But I saw “Roustabout” as Saturday matinee in Pine Grove, PA. With a screwdriver cup of soda and bag of popcorn, fitting for a carnival movie.
The music in “Roustabout” is mostly pocket lint. But the opening number after the title sequence, “Poison Ivy League,” is great, particularly for what follows. Elvis karate chops three of America’s privileged into submission (one actually runs away) in a parking lot. Elvis was really into the karate chopping. And in every movie, no matter how lousy, if there’s a fight scene, he always gets one in.
Anyway, Elvis as Charlie Rodgers, a character virtually indistinguishable from his Deke Rivers in “Loving You,” except for a far superior sneer, gets backed into being a carny.
You know how it works: Eventually he saves the nearing bankruptcy business when he sees how he’s let those with better character down. Barbara Stanwyck takes half the show. And outside of “Poison Ivy League,” “Hard Knocks” is all you want to hear.
“So loaded with cash/They give me a rash,” the chorus from “Poison Ivy League” cries out for revival.
It’s the mid-60s. The Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan are happening, so how does Elvis Presley answer? He puts his heavy foot down, pedal to the metal on two racing car comedy musical romances, one sub-mediocre, the other godawful.
“Spinout’s” ridiculous story has Elvis as a bandleader and Grand Prix race car driver in the hills above Santa Barbara. A committed (maybe that should have been “confirmed”) bachelor, he’s chased by three women, one of them his drummer, played by Gidget.
All the characters are either simpering, swaggering or antagonizing. The only things that save the movie are the Three Stooges-like Grand Prix race (dig the cars spinning out and going the wrong direction and Elvis spinning out, and smoking over the same clump of straw more than once) and the music.
About the music: The uptempo tunes save it, special notice to the tromping, swingin’ shuffle, “I’ll Be Back.” There’s the title cut and two, “BeachShack” and “Smorgasbord” played at a pool party without a grain of sand in sight. “BeachShack” is a loose rip-off of Rolf Harris’ “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport.” “Never Say Yes” has a snappy drum break, offset by the tune’s terrible fuzz guitar’
“I saw that movie and it was dirty!” yells “Les” (Elvis’s female drummer) at a cookout. “Spinout” would have benefited from some good old-fashioned filth.
“Speedway,” from 1968, is bad from start to finish with moments of laughter only because parts are so senseless.
Nancy Sinatra is dumbfoundingly cast as an IRS auditor and Bill Bixby, fresh off “My Favorite Martian,” is Elvis’ (again as an entertainer and race car driver, this time — NASCAR) manager. There’s also an annoying tv variety show comedian, Carl Ballantine, who seemed to be hot stuff at the time, as Elvis’ mechanic.
One song furnishes most of the unintentional hilarity, “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad,” about Uncle Sam, tax man.
Choice lyric:
“If he calls you, as he may do, don’t be mad, don’t be frightened,
red, white, and blue/Just be thankful you don’t live in Leningrad/Just remember, he’s your uncle, not your dad.”
As a tune, best fit would have been as one of those acetate-mounted-on-cardboard singles included every so often with a copy of MAD magazine. Astonishing Elvis didn’t walk off the set, it’s that humiliating.
“It’s a beautiful job of driving by both these drivers,” raves the “Speedway” announcer. Indeed! And viewers were screwed at the ticket window by this screw-up movie.
Both pics feature major product placement for Fender Musical Instruments, which had just experienced a big expansion when Leo Fender sold out to CBS.
Reprinted from Facebook while I was out. All movies reviewed in the Pasadena Elvis Presley Film Fest were either downloaded or streamed from pirate sites.
Omar Mateen’s calling of 911 from the toilet of the Pulse and subsequent declaration of allegiance to ISIS was just a smokescreen. Mateen knew he was going to be killed and tried to set the story. In this he was successful.
In my estimation, Mateen was a loathsome and apparently very vain American man who just happened to be Muslim. He blew a spoke because he was gay or bisexual, couldn’t be a human being about it and so decided to kill a lot of gay people at a club he frequented. Using his paramilitary/police training and weaponry. Self-radicalized, my butt.
Mateen’s obsession with selfies was and is nothing less than nauseating. It’s not the picture of a Muslim terrorist. It’s the picture of someone, very disagreeable, in love with himself. Mateen probably sent them to many people he wished to hook up with (it now appears this is so), unbidden, who woke up to the news of his massacre and said to themselves, “Oh, jeezus, that guy!”
This story will come out. There were people at the club quite familiar with Mateen but now circumspect in what they have to say, understandably so, because they don’t want the FBI, Homeland Security and the media crawling all over them.
Would you?
This is most probably the central truth of the massacre, one that our six figure media explainers and terrorism experts simply won’t want to attribute without wasting everyone’s time concocting some long, stupid and convoluted story about ISIS and its inspiration to those not yet fully realized terrorists.
“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reacted to the Orlando shooting with evidence that they can agree on at least one thing: bombing people,” reads The Intercept. “Both candidates called for an escalation of the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.”
You would expect nothing else.
Right on schedule, sales of AR-15s/M-16s jump. The real national character is defined by the image of the assault rifle, one aimed at your head.
Most of it having to do with the pains of having to deal with WordPress and the hosting company. I’m 60, much older than when I started, and less capable. And blogging through the bugs and database errors was a nuisance. It stopped being fun.
And then I got threatened by the hosting company for not applying the latest updates.
Which entailed thought about whether I wanted to shut it entirely and dump all the years of essays and posts. Came close.
But over the weekend I cherry-picked the best essays over the last few years — there were about thirty.
And then I went about updating to the latest version. It took most of the evening, going through rolling incrimental changes.
Now, here it is.
N.b.: The hosting company is still poor, along with its database server, which has some sort of incurable disease.