BLUE HAWAII: Paramount Presents...4K/Blu-ray (Paramount Pictures, 1961) Paramount Home Video

For better or worse, director, Norman Taurog’s Blue Hawaii (1961) marked a turning point in the career of Elvis Presley, when Elvis’ aspirations to become a ‘great actor’ were finitely dismantled by his wrangler, Colonel Parker’s driving ambitions to merely capitalize on Presley’s box office cache as the hip-swiveling stud of the jukebox. The first of three Elvis pics to feature the sun-filtered isles of Hawaii, shimmering exquisitely, also - to offer the best of all song catalogs for an Elvis travelogue, Blue Hawaii is, at least in retrospect, a real step down for Elvis – if hardly, his fans, who made it a $4.2 million mega smash at the box office. Perhaps, acutely aware he was digressing from his own aims, Presley ultimately had no choice but to comply with the edicts of the system. Yet, in reviewing Blue Hawaii today, one is immediately struck by its too conveniently contrived stunted adolescence, catching distinct glimpses of Presley’s burgeoning ennui with the material – chiefly, Hal Kanter’s thoroughly lackluster screenplay, barely to provide enough connective tissue and dialogue between 14 songs wedged into 102-minutes of pure escapist tripe.

The saving grace here is that, despite its shortcomings, Blue Hawaii remains fairly enjoyable fluff and nonsense. If Presley, thinly disguised as his fictional alter ego, Chadwick Gates, and, the rest of the cast, to include Joan Blackman (as Chad’s gal/pal, Maile Duval, in a role originally intended for Juliet Prowse), Angela Lansbury (Chad’s overbearing Southern mum, Sara Lee), Howard McNear (Maile’s scattershot boss, Mr. Chapman), and Nancy Walters (as sultry school teacher, Abigail Prentice) are given precious little to say or do, the sight of an immaculately coiffed Presley, gyrating pop tunes or cooing ballads throughout, is enough to give one pause and bask in the afterglow of one of the truly untouchable pop stars of his generation. Presley was only 26 – just 10 years younger than Lansbury and only 18 months older than Walters (who is supposed to be playing a middle-aged woman) - when he made Blue Hawaii. And he brings to it all the vitality and testosterone-infused vigor of youth, decidedly marching to a different beat and already well on to its own immortality.  

The secret weapon here is legendary producer, Hal B. Wallis, (born, Aaron Blum Wolowicz), whose hit-making career unfurls an embarrassment of riches, including Little Caesar (1931), The Petrified Forest (1936), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Dark Victory, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (both in 1939), All This, and Heaven Too, Santa Fe Trail (both in 1940), Sergeant York, The Maltese Falcon, They Died with Their Boots On (all in 1941), Casablanca, Now, Voyager, and, Yankee Doodle Dandy (all in 1942), This Is the Army (1943), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), Dark City (1950), The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), Barefoot in the Park (1967), True Grit, and, Anne of the Thousand Days (both in 1969). Wallis’ career is the ‘stuff of dreams’ – effortlessly to graduate from Warner Bros. publicity department in 1923 to head of production, and, after a truly bittersweet split from his boss, Jack L. Warner, extending his own longevity as an industry freelancer over the next 30 years, along the way, becoming personally involved in 400 features. Blue Hawaii is Wallis’ fourth trip to the well with Elvis (after, 1957’s Loving You, 1958’s King Creole and 1960’s G.I. Blues). Alas, outside of Presley’s performance, only to come alive during the songs (and the Hawaiian vistas, always tropically resplendent) there is not a whole lot to recommend here. Those seeking the Elvis that might have been, should instead check out 1956’s Love Me Tender, 1957’s Jailhouse Rock or King Creole. Blue Hawaii is strictly for the tourist trade. Still, Wallis knows his way around a slickly packaged, and even more efficiently marketed musical.

Coinciding with Presley’s much-publicized 1960 release from ‘active duty’ in the U.S. Armed Forces (the official ‘discharge’ came in 1964), Blue Hawaii has Elvis’ alter-ego, Chadwick Gates, disembarking from a plane in Honolulu, to be picked up by his native gal/pal, Maile Duval, in Chad’s flashy red MG MGA 1600 MKI. Chad left the islands a carefree youth. It is anticipated by his mum, Sara Lee and dad, Fred (Roland Winters) he will assume his more clear-headed and mature responsibilities as the heir apparent to his family’s prosperous Great Southern Hawaiian Fruit Company. Alas, Chad has other ideas – not the least, to laze around with his pals at the beach house, keeping his homecoming a secret from his parents for five whole days.  Eventually, Fred confronts Maile and she insists Chad make his presence known. However, Chad’s official ‘homecoming’ is anything but sweet.

After some brief and ineffective subterfuge, Chad informs Fred and Sara Lee and their good friend/company sales manager, Jack Kelman (John Archer), he has no intention of going to work in the family biz. Instead, under Maile’s auspices, Chad gets a job with her travel agency, working for the bumbling Mr. Chapman, who immediately puts Chad in charge of a guided island tour for school teacher, Miss Prentice and her four teenage charges – Patsy Simon (Darlene Tompkins), Beverly Martin (Christian Kay), Selena Emerson (Pamela Austin) and Ellie Corbett (Jenny Maxwell). Ellie will prove to be a handful. Not only is she initially distant and noncompliant to have some ‘fun’ orchestrated by Chad for the group, but later, she deliberately inveigles herself with married, and very much inebriated, Tucker Garvey (Steve Brodie), resulting in a brawl that gets Chad fired, and then, to throw herself at Chad’s head in her flailed flagrante delicto. This ends in an overwrought and anti-climactic faux suicide attempt, complete with bittersweet confession and tears. Meanwhile, Maile misconstrues Miss Prentice’s ‘interests’ in Chad as favoring a romantic slant – a suspicion seemingly confirmed when Prentice arrives at Chad’s hotel bungalow in the middle of the night to confide a desperate love…just not for him! How does it all end, with Prentice and Jack on the road to romance as Maile and Chad preparing for their wedding day.

These plot contrivances are so wafer-thin, one sincerely wonders why Wallis and Kanter bothered at all as we might have done better to just have Elvis in concert photographed in Hawaii. Aside: as part of the movie’s promo, Elvis actually gave a charity concert in Hawaii. We never get to see Prentice and Jack falling in love. So, Prentice’s moonlight confession to Chad comes out of nowhere. Ditto for Maile’s chronically feigned jealousy, instantly expelled exclusively against Prentice on the basis of the latter’s good looks. I mean, doesn’t Maile trust her man at all? Ellie’s shrewish behavior is given a short shrift scene where she affirms to Chad, being a spoiled, rich girl whose parents regularly ship her off to boarding school and lavish vacations. Thereafter, Ellie’s magical conversion to ‘good girl’, acting her age rather than her shoe size thanks to Chad’s no-nonsense tough love, is as inane and absurd as personal reformations get. And then there is Lansbury’s Sara Lee, who vehemently objects to her white son dating a native girl of mixed heritage, passes out cold when informed by Fred over the phone of Chad and Maile pending nuptials, but then, turns up at the marriage, blissfully nattering on with maternal pride to Maile’s grandmother (Flora K. Hayes), who is of royal blood. So, if anything, Chad is marrying ‘up’ – not the other way around.

The other Hawaiian actors to appear in Blue Hawaii, including Hilo Hattie as Waihila, Lani Kai (Carl Tanami), Frank Atienza (Ito O'Hara) and Tiki Hanalei as the Gates’ houseboy, Ping Pong are all cut from the stereotypical dimwitted ilk – just good-natured natives, fit for the subservient class. Another time/another place, I suppose. But their portrayals in Blue Hawaii are fairly enfeebled and more than a bit insulting nonetheless. To get Elvis’ pasty tail up to speed as an ‘island boy’, Hal B. Wallis commissioned daily sessions under a tanning lamp. Even so, his clean-cut Chad has WASP written all over it – Colonel Parker’s push to homogenize the ‘dangerous’ pelvis-thrusting prince of fifties’ pop culture to a more ‘family friendly’ reincarnation more easily to appeal to the Suzie Cream Cheese sect. Production also ran afoul of rival producer, Walter Mirisch – then, preparing Hawaii (1966), and believing Wallis had deliberately tried to sabotage his picture by similarly naming his own after the song, Blue Hawaii (actually, a hit parade fav for Paramount’s other big star, Bing Crosby, all the way back in 1937).

To coincide with the making of the film, Elvis agreed to a charity concert for the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, entering the recording booth shortly thereafter to create the movie’s soundtrack, and then, to shoot for barely three weeks in and around Waikiki Beach, Diamond Head, Mount Tantalus, and Hanauma Bay. From here, production resumed on interior sets back in Hollywood where Presley inadvertently bruised his fingers while giving karate demonstrations with his friend, Red West. During this time, Presley was also prone to give wild cast parties, frowned upon by Hal Wallis, as his female entourage of co-stars chronically arrived on the set looking like hell from the previous night’s carousing.  There was little to complain about when Blue Hawaii went on to become a runaway smash, breaking box office records and affording Wallis the opportunity to pour all of his funds from it into his subsequent passion project, Becket (1964).

As with much of Presley’s subsequent movie career, the success of Blue Hawaii hermetically sealed his reputation as a ‘good boy’, simultaneously to enthrall his fans but appall the critics who found it bland and uneventful entertainment at best. In hindsight, it is difficult to argue with that assessment. Elvis is, in essence, sleep-walking through the ‘dramatic’ portions of the screenplay, such as they are, while investing much more of himself in the choreographically bereft staging of the musical numbers. During ‘Slice Some Sand’, the entire cast assault Frank Atienza by playfully kicking sand in his cherub-esque face. Kanter’s cacophony of staged guffaws fit succinctly into the exposition, while offering nothing remotely fresh on which to hang our hopes. Alas, L.A. Times’ John Scott’s prediction that ‘one of these days, Elvis will play a straight role with substance and we’ll definitely find out whether he can act or not’ was never to be realized. As the decade wore on, Presley’s career instead devolved into an increasingly bad spate of quickly assembled, and just as easily disposable travelogues, capitalizing on Elvis’ chart-topping music career, but with zero opportunity to spread his artistic wings. When Elvis died, a bloated, wan ghost flower of his former self on Aug. 16, 1977, prematurely brought on by cardiac arrest from a drug overdose, the world was left to contemplate the man and the career that might have been. Nevertheless, unfulfilled promise is the most terrible legacy to endure.

Blue Hawaii arrives on 4K and Blu-ray via the studio’s Paramount Presents…line-up. As with the studio’s previous standard Blu release of To Catch a Thief, Paramount here has elected to re-compose the main titles from surviving stock footage with new titles recreated, arguably, to ensure the visual integrity of the backdrops that, as originally released with limited opticals back in 1961, were distorted, blurry and often sported murky colors. While, the backgrounds now on this 4K rendition are undeniably and substantially improved, the titles have not been carried over in exactly the same font as their originals. Odd, why Paramount would go to all this trouble to improve the visuals, but not go the extra bit to perfectly recreate the titles. It’s frankly baffling. Regardless, the new 4K and its companion Blu-ray (also included herein) represent Blue Hawaii in a manner unseen, arguably, since its theatrical release. Overall image refinement on the 4K is positively breathtaking, revealing minute detail in hair, clothing and foliage…also, to expose the intermittent use of rear-screen projection during driving sequences. Colors pop. The 4K yields substantially richer black levels than its standard Blu-ray counterpart, which also looks quite solid. The 4K surpasses the Blu in overall color refinement and saturation, while reproducing noticeably more accurate flesh tones. These still tend to look a tad orangey and flat on the Blu by direct comparison.

Regrettably, the 4K does not include the original restored mono audio. The new 5.1 DTS represents some curious compromises. During Elvis’ ‘Rock-a-Hula’ the Jordanaires’ are all but removed, heard now as a faint echo in the background when, originally, they provided some wonderfully robust accompaniment throughout this number. There is also some brief, and odd, audio drop out during ‘Aloha oe’ and ‘Moonlight Swim’ numbers. It’s a genuine pity, Paramount did not spend the extra coin to transfer either the James L. Neibaur commentary, or Blue Hawaii scrapbook and theatrical trailer extras to 4K. These, like the restored mono track, are exclusive to the Blu-ray. Apparently, the Paramount Presents…line-up has also dropped the brief ‘intro’s’ that used to feature noted film historian/critic, Leonard Maltin. Blue Hawaii does not have one. Finally, can someone at Paramount please pay a little more attention to the artwork being used on the menus for this picture?!? Blue Hawaii has always sported the same image artwork since it was released on DVD in 1999 – a still from 1966’s Paradise, Hawaiian Style – NOT Blue Hawaii!!! Bottom line: overall, a solid effort. But like so much of what seems to be coming down the pike at the mountain these days, Blue Hawaii on 4K represents a compromise – a case of where just a bit more effort applied could have yielded a perfect UHD release, instead of one where certain aforementioned criteria continues to lag. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

Blu-ray only - 2