Presley, Elvis

Blue Hawaii

Elvis Presley's seventh film was the first of his "Hawaii trilogy" (including Girls! Girls! Girls! and Paradise, Hawaiian Style). While its story is daft--the King has just been released from his Army posting in Italy and returned to the islands, where he's trying to avoid working in his father's fruit business--the music is not: "Blue Hawaii," "Almost Always True," and the beautiful "Can't Help Falling in Love." Angela Lansbury plays Elvis's mother, who can't seem to get through to him. Directed by the star's frequent collaborator, Norman Taurog (G.I. Blues). --Tom Keogh

Elvis, playing an ex-G.I. beachcomber in Hawaii, goes against his mother's wishes to get a corporate job and takes a job as a tour guide, which provides him the opportunity to romance several pretty young women.
Genre: Musicals
Rating: PG
Release Date: 14-AUG-2007
Media Type: DVD

Fun in Acapulco

In 1963 Elvis could still be energized by the music in his movies, and the production values hadn't yet descended to budget-crunching level. Thus the breezy pleasure of Fun in Acapulco, which sees the pelvis-swinger coming to life for a rousing "Bossa Nova Baby" and a clutch of faux-Mexican tunes. Nice scenery of the fabled resort, but the movie has a strange disconnect (which becomes weirdly fascinating if you keep track of it): Elvis himself is limited to standing and singing in front of rear-projection Mexican vistas, while his hard-working double bicycles down streets, strides across beaches, etc. The newly hot Ursula Andress keeps Elvis and his double company. Elvis's jobs are among his craziest movie gigs: he begins as a deckhand, is hired as a nightclub entertainer/lifeguard, but is revealed to be a trapeze artist in his former life. By the end, of course, he is also a cliff diver. --Robert Horton

Rocking and rolling south of the border, "Fun in Acapulco" finds Elvis starring as Mike Windgren, a recently unemployed boat hand who finds work as a lifeguard and singer at a local hotel. Clashing with a rival lifeguard who resents Mike's competition of who can impress the women the most. Tempted by a lady bullfighter (Cardenas) and a beautiful temptress (Andress), Windgren must rely on his ability to croon Latin love songs including "You Can't Say No in Acapulco" and "Bossa Nova Baby" to prove his romantic prowess.

Follow That Dream

Elvis hadn't dyed his hair a permanent midnight black yet in Follow That Dream, which is another way of saying this is still the point in his career when he was making movies, not just Elvis Presley vehicles. Elvis road-trips with his crabby, anti-government pop (Arthur O'Connell) and an adopted brood to a Florida beach, which by a legal quirk they can homestead. The authorities and some fairly unbelievable gangsters would like to stop them. The songs are undistinguished but not awful, the scenery is nice, and Elvis--looking well-fed and relaxed--shows off good comedic chops doing a dumb-guy shtick. Screenwriter Charles Lederer and director Gordon Douglas are a class act by Presley picture standards, keeping the sitcom-style plot moving along. No fancy clothes or cars in this one, just Elvis and some beachcombing and an old git-tar, and not a bad time-killer for all that. --Robert Horton

Elvis Presley is at his dreamboat peak in this musical comedy that finds the sexy star crooning five original songs in an amusing and fast-paced (Variety) romp boasting a delightful mixture of songs romance humor and good old homespun warmth (Citizen-News)!When his scheming pop decides to homestead the family on a public beach Toby Kwimper (Presley) digs the exotic setting but hates the attention he is suddenly receiving. Though he just wants to play his guitar Toby finds himself up to his baby blues in trouble with government bureaucrats crime bosses and even two smitten kittens an adopted little sister who feels more than sisterly love for him and a social worker with more than his welfare on her mind!System Requirements: Running Time 109 MinFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 027616903969 Manufacturer No: 1006194

King Creole

Before his handlers convinced him to settle for the safety of a screen franchise, the young Elvis Presley harbored riskier dreams as an actor, not just a star. This 1958 drama, his fourth feature outing, hints at the underlying seriousness of that goal. Presley plays Danny Fisher, a New Orleans teenager struggling to graduate from high school while working in a sleazy French Quarter club to support his family. He's also characterized as a troubled youth with a dangerous temper and feelings of shame and resentment toward his meek, unemployed father (Dean Jagger). When Danny's gift for singing provides him with a potential career break (and the requisite excuse for Elvis's production numbers), his involvement with a ruthless gangster (Walter Matthau) and his sultry, alcoholic moll (Carolyn Jones) soon threatens both his future and his family.

That story line, with Danny torn between a budding romance with a good waitress (Dolores Hart) and the bad moll, Ronnie (Jones), proves as effective as it is predictable, hardly surprising given its source in an early Harold Robbins bestseller. But King Creole also boasts an impressive production pedigree (including the team behind no less a classic than Casablanca, producer Hal Wallis and director Michael Curtiz), and the supporting cast helps elicit one of Presley's most emotional performances. Jones in particular rises above her role's inherent clichés, her self-loathing and sexuality both palpable. Presley, still a few years away from the more sanitized image that would be integral to those franchise features, is young enough to be a credible teen, but more crucially he makes his rage and yearning largely convincing.

Ironically, the dramatic sparks prove all the more welcome in light of the largely forgettable music, which variously plunders Chicago blues ("Trouble," a knock-off of "Hoochie Coochie Man") and unconvincingly crosses Presley's Memphis rock with Crescent City jazz ("Dixieland Rock"), all to far less effect than Presley's two preceding movies, Jailhouse Rock and Loving You. --Sam Sutherland

Danny Fisher, a teenager with a criminal record becomes a pop singer in New Orleans but is pursued by the local crime boss.
Genre: Musicals
Rating: PG
Release Date: 14-AUG-2007
Media Type: DVD

Viva Las Vegas (Deluxe Edition)

It's pretty tough to beat Jailhouse Rock in terms of sheer entertainment, but Elvis lovers are particularly fond of this 1964 hit. The Big E plays race-car driver Lucky Jackson, who arrives in Las Vegas for an upcoming Grand Prix race. Lucky's car needs a new engine, so he gets a waiter job at a casino and starts working his crooning charms on Rusty Martin (Ann-Margret). It's their on-screen chemistry that makes this flick a lot of fun; Presley never had a better costar than Ann-Margret, and their race-car romance is quintessential 1960s fluff. Then there are the songs, of course, including the snappy title tune, a rockin' rendition of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say?," and "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Viva Las Vegas is one of the Elvis movies that stands the test of time, when the legend was still at his peak. And if you're wondering if the King gets his car fixed in time to win the race, well, check out the movie to find out. --Jeff Shannon

Elvis Presley is Lucky Jackson an aspiring auto racer with a dream of winning the Grand Prix. Sexy spunky Ann-Margret is Rusty Martin the swimming instructor who falls for him against her will hating the idea of her man risking his life in a race car. Lucky struggles to raise the money to buy a new engine while Rusty tries to convince him to give up racing for her.George Sidney a seasoned veteran of the lavish Hollywood musical proves the perfect helmsman for this high-voltage Elvis vehicle. The King croons shakes and shimmies while Ann-Margret shows her mastery of 1960s-style gyrations in the glitzy electric production numbers. The two charismatic stars are at their best during a hilarious first date which includes dancing motorcycling dressing up at a wild West show skiing and going for a ride in a helicopter. How could they not hit it off? Their powerful magnetism centers this glittering extravagant treasure chest of a film that ranks among Elvis's best.System Requirements:Running Time: 86 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 012569797840 Manufacturer No: 79784

Girls Girls Girls (1962)

Hawaii seems like an afterthought in Elvis's second island outing. Half the musical numbers take place on boats (including the seasick-making title tune) and half in a Trader Vic's-style nightclub, so there's little good use of the exotic locale. There's little use of that lovable dish Stella Stevens, either, who's relegated to "other woman" duty as Elvis courts bland Laurel Goodwin. Goodwin's a rich girl going incognito, while E.P. is a penniless fisherman who dreams of owning his own boat. You finish the plot. The King is in good voice here, although the songs are fairly weak, with some curious flings at calypso and flamenco mixed in. He comes to shoulder-shaking life for "Return to Sender," a sizzling number that shows how his entire being could be possessed by a musical moment. This movie doesn't have enough of those to boost it into the upper tier of Elvis pictures. --Robert Horton

G.I. Blues (Widescreen)

After Elvis Presley got out of the army in 1960, he was instantly ushered into this Paramount movie about an Oklahoma singer who (surprise) gets out of the army and wants to open a club. Making a potentially lucrative bet that he can seduce a cabaret singer (Juliet Prowse), Elvis instead falls in love. Refurbished from his rockabilly roots into a slicker model for early-'60s pop, the Elvis of this movie is the one who made almost 30 more just like it. The songs include the title track, plus "It's Not Good Enough for You," "Tonight Is So Right for Love," and "Wooden Heart." Directed by Norman Taurog, a studio veteran who made his first film in 1928 and worked numerous times with Presley as well as Jerry Lewis. --Tom Keogh

Tulsa, a singing G.I. in West Germany bets he can spend the night with Lili, a supposedly hard hearted club dancer.
Genre: Musicals
Rating: PG
Release Date: 14-AUG-2007
Media Type: DVD

Change of Habit

Elvis tried something different in his final narrative movie… but the results are oddly similar to his usual '60s formula. Here the King plays a doctor working in an inner-city free clinic, playing host to three Catholic nurses (who are really nuns incognito). Elvis gets hung up on one of the nuns, played by Mary Tyler Moore; she seems a lot closer to The Dick Van Dyke Show than the Vatican. The songs are sparse--"Rubberneckin'" gets a workout in one of those awful stilted hootenannies so prevalent in Elvis pictures. The flower-power ambience is more interesting than the story; the film features Mod Squad-style attempts at racial politics, a sit-down protest, and a weird sequence involving "rage reduction" to cure an autistic child. Elvis has good scenes and indifferent ones, but he looks fantastic (this is just after the great "comeback"), and he dresses like no other doctor before or since. --Robert Horton

Girl Happy

Elvis Presley does the clam--a now-forgotten dance--in this 1964 potboiler in which the King stars as a singer who gets a gig in Ft. Lauderdale with his combo but has to baby-sit a mobster's teenage daughter (Shelley Fabares) as part of the deal. Fabares's character, looking for a break, runs wild and makes life difficult for Elvis. The film has the usual "Elvis movie" bounce and wolfish jokes and glossy disposability, but the endearing (and smart) presence of Fabares as the love interest adds a bit more zip than usual. Songs include the title track, plus "Puppet on a String," "Do Not Disturb," and "Let's Party Tonight." Directed by Boris Sagal (The Omega Man). --Tom Keogh

Elvis plays Rusty Wells the leader of a four-piece rock group consisting of Gary Crosby Joby Baker and Jimmy Hawkins. Hired by Chicago gangster boss Big Frank (Harold J. Stone) to protect the virtue of Frank's cute daughter Valerie (Shelley Fabares) Rusty and his buddies follow Valerie to Fort Lauderdale during Spring Break. The girl falls in love with Rusty then falls out of love when she learns that he's in her dad's employ. Valerie then becomes involved with a slick Italian playboy (Fabrizio Mioni) forcing Rusty to break up the romance lest he end up in a cement overcoat.Running Time: 96 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: MUSICALS/MUSICALS UPC: 012569797529 Manufacturer No: 79752

Elvis Presley: Paradise, Hawaiian Style

Elvis and Hawaii go together like one of Graceland's peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. To be honest, though, Paradise, Hawaiian Style finds the King looking puffier and sleepier than he did in the salad days of Blue Hawaii. Making matters worse is the song selection and the prominence of an allegedly adorable child actor--always a bad thing in an Elvis picture. Despite all that, there's something casually likable about the film: costar James Shigeta is a welcome performer (he plays the island pilot who goes into business with flyboy Elvis), leading lady Susanna Leigh is an above-average companion, and the location shooting is a big upgrade over the cardboard backdrops of many late-career Presley vehicles. Extended musical sequences take place at the Polynesian Cultural Center--nothing wrong with that, but rock & roll has been left pretty far behind. --Robert Horton

No Description Available.
Genre: Musicals
Rating: G
Release Date: 14-AUG-2007
Media Type: DVD