Blue Hawaii

Blue Hawaii was one of the top box-office earners of 1961. Believe it or not, this is the first Elvis Presley movie I've ever seen. I'm not a big Elvis guy--I certainly respect his place in rock and roll history, but I don't own any of his music. I certainly don't dislike his music, but his movies don't have a great reputation. According to Little Steven Van Zandt and my friend Lora, who is a big Elvis fan, Kid Creole is the only good movie he made.

Blue Hawaii certainly is not any good, but it's pleasant enough and not aggressively awful. Elvis plays a Hawaii kid who is back from the army. He just wants to surf and hang out with his Hawaiian native friends, and his girlfriend (Joan Blackman), who is half-Hawaiian. His parents, though, including his Southern belle mother (Angela Lansbury, in a way-over-the-top performance) want him to go work for the family's pineapple business.

A compromise is struck by Elvis getting a job as a tour guide. He's assigned a pretty young schoolteacher and four of her charges. Sit-com like plot situations arise, along with several songs, including "Can't Help Falling in Love," one of Elvis' loveliest recordings. It's stupid but innocuous. At first I was uncomfortable with native Hawaiians being depicted as kind of mythical beings, like the way Irishmen are frequently depicted as being like leprechauns. But I found, as the film went on, that the film was respectful of Hawaiian culture.

A few weird things: the script, by Hal Kanter, was nominated for a Writer's Guild Award. Granted, the category was for Best Written American Musical, but please. The film was directed by Norman Taurog, who still holds the record for the youngest to ever win an Oscar for Best Director.

In the unpleasant category, Jenny Maxwell, who plays one of the teen girls, died in 1981 when she and her husband were shot to death during a supposed botched robbery.