Lights!
Camera! Elvis! Collection (Blue Hawaii/Easy Come, Easy Go/Fun in Acapulco/G.I.
Blues/Girls! Girls! Girls!/King Creole/ Paradise Hawaiian Style/Roustabout) (DVD-Video)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C- Films: C+ (B for King Creole)
Blue Hawaii (1961, Panavision, with Angela
Lansbury, Joan Blackman, Roland Winters)
Easy Come, Easy Go (1967, with Dodie
Marshall, Pat Priest, Pat Harrington and Elsa Lanchester)
Fun In Acapulco (1963, with Ursula
Andress, Alejandro Rey and Paul Lukas)
G.I. Blues (1960, with Juliet Prowse and
Robert Ivers)
Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962, with Stella
Stevens, Jeremy Slate and Benson Fong)
King Creole
(1958, VistaVision, with Carolyn Jones, Dolores Hart, Dean Jagger,
Walter Matthau, Paul Stewart and Vic Morrow)
Paradise Hawaiian Style (1966, with Susanna
Leigh and Julie Parrish)
Roustabout (1964, Techniscope, with
Barbara Stanwyck, Leif Erikson, Joan Freeman, Sue Ane Langdon, Rachel Welsh and
Teri Garr)
When Elvis Presley began doing feature
films, they were big productions and the given studio joined RCA Records in
backing the project to full A-level status.
Eventually, Col. Tom Parker decided mass production and formula were the
way to go and the many films that followed the initial ones almost totally killed
The King’s career. The good period of
formula (beginning with G.I. Blues) peaked after a rough road in 1964
with Viva Las Vegas and just about all the films after (except the likes
of Speedway) were contrived and increasingly plastic, or the opposite of
what made Elvis a star to begin with.
Paramount’s Lights! Camera! Elvis! Collection repackages eight of
those films (or a quarter of all dramatic films Elvis made) from older DVD
releases for one last run in the format.
You can see the films above and they are
all just about the same. The formula
roughly translates to Elvis is a good guy looking for fun and romance, can sing
and faces some challenges to finding success and will spend the film trying to
overcome them. In between the drama, he
will sing enough songs to fill up a vinyl 33 1/3 record. This became known as “The Elvis Musical”
though it was not really a Musical and if anything, further marked the decline
of that genre. The early films could,
when he did sing many songs, be thought of as backstage Musicals like King
Creole, but the rest were just precursors to the Music Video with fluff in
between.
King Creole is the A-level exception here
for several reasons. Besides the cast
and money on the screen, this is a very well written film, Elvis is in peak
form above going through the motions in later films and this is often forgotten
as the first major A-level Rock Music film when so many performance films were
low-budget compilations that were sometimes lucky enough to secure some or many
name acts of the time. A Hard Day’s
Night and Woodstock have obscured King Creole more than they
should have, but King Creole is just as good and important. Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) directed
it and it is a gem long overdue for rediscovery and revisionist thinking.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 to 1.85 X 1 image on most of the films are a
little softer than you might want and these are old DVD transfers. The two scope films (Blue Hawaii and Roustabout) are anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 and
only Roustabout suffers the most detail degradation since it is in
the weakest of frames. King Creole
is the only large-frame format film in the bunch and only one in black and
white. The result is the best detail and
depth of the bunch. The rest are all film
originally released in dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor and almost all
those transfers (except Paradise, which has poor color and is easily the
one bad print in the bunch, with even more issues than Roustabout) have
at least some fine moments of that color in their transfers here, often saving
the disc from looking worse.
All being older DVDs, the detail and
depth can be a problem. However, these
are still watchable and inevitably will be out in the HD formats. All are also originally monophonic releases,
here in Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono and in Dolby 5.1 upgrades that all need much
more work. It seems stereo copies of the
Elvis songs are dropped into the 5.1 mixes.
Some of the films have trailers as their only extras, while others have
no extras at all. Let’s hope that is
corrected for the HD versions.
- Nicholas Sheffo
