Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 166 Blue Hawaii (1961)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

As someone who has made his living as a pop culture writer for just under a quarter century I am always looking for patterns and unexpected themes, for the places in life and pop culture that overlap unexpectedly or blur in interesting and unexpected ways. 

Last week, for example, I wrote up U2: Rattle and Hum for this column and now I’m writing up the weirdly simpatico 1961 Uber-Elvis Presley vehicle Blue Hawaii, rock and roll movies with a surprising amount in common. 

Rattle and Hum and Blue Hawaii are both simultaneously famous and infamous exercises in rock star self-parody. In Rattle and Hum Bono emerges as a ridiculous caricature of a pretentious rock star while in Blue Hawaii pushes the shamelessness and glorious vulgarity of Elvis movie formula to glorious comic extremes. 

In Rattle and Hum Bono and the boys explored our country’s rich history of black music largely through the mythology of Elvis Aaron Presley, visiting Graceland, recording at Sun studios and discussing his film career at length. 

Elvis’ brand of self-parody is much more fun because it takes itself less seriously. Blue Hawaii knows damn well that it is shameless cheese and lustily embraces its liberating vulgarity, its irrepressible cornball energy. 

For Bono and white people everywhere, Elvis represents something pure and true about the essence of American roots music. There’s so much Elvis in our musical DNA that it’s impossible to imagine pop culture and pop music without him. 

Elvis was the original rock and roll sell-out. He went from the raw, almost punk aggression and edge of 1957’s Jailhouse Rock to the crowd-pleasing safeness of Blue Hawaii over the course of just a few years, from playing a rebel without a cause who would sooner burn down society than try to fit in to playing Chad, a rich jerk from Hawaii high society whose biggest problem is that his super-wealthy parents want him to settle down and make big money working in the family fruit business.

According to Wikipedia, “Producer Hal B. Wallis was keen to put Presley into a film that showed how the army affected a man” and figured that Elvis, the most famous ex-G.I in the world, was the perfect leading man for such a film. 

Forget The Best Years of Our Lives: Blue Hawaii is pure escapism that depicts a happy, well-adjusted hunk making an effortless transition from army life to civilian life that mostly involves singing, dancing, beautiful girls and partying in paradise. 

Blue Hawaii opens with Elvis’ ex-G.I. Chad (Chadwick) Gates getting off a plane still in uniform and kissing a strange woman pretty much solely to make his half-French/half-Hawaiian girlfriend Maile Duval (Joan Blackman) jeallous, then serenading her with, “Almost Always True”, a song that about how he was unfaithful to her, but not excessively so, during their time apart. 


Chad’s wealthy parents Fred (Roland Winters) and Sarah Lee (a thirty-six year old Angela Lansbury, doing a delightfully daffy burlesque of of a Southern Belle) want their strong-willed son to settle down and accept the moneyed life of leisure they have mapped out for him but he chooses instead to rebel through under-employment by securing work as a tour guide for pretty schoolteacher Abigail Prentice (Nancy Walters) and her four teenaged charges, including Ellie (Jenny Maxwell), a doe-eyed 17 year old blonde beauty who understandably develops sexual feelings for her impossibly handsome, virile tour guide. 

At first this intense physical yearning for Chad’s hot body and pretty face manifests itself in being haughty and cold but it isn’t long until Ellie is sneaking into Chad’s hotel room and throwing herself at him in a fever of desire. 

When Chad sneers that he doesn’t rob the cradle, the horny teenager disrobes and seductively inquires, “Did you ever see anything like this in a cradle?”, which is way creepier then she thinks. 

In a scene that really feels like a prelude to full-on pornography Chad tells the underage girl trying to seduce him that he should give her a “good old-fashioned spanking” for being so impudent and she weepingly tells him that no one has ever cared about her enough for corporal punishment before. 

Then, instead of coldly ordering the lust-crazed girl back to her room Chad takes her over his knee and spanks her butt repeatedly, over and over and over again until the image of the 26 year old stud lustily spanking a petulant 17 year old beauty gives way to a scene of total bliss the following day. 

Getting spanked in what sure feels like an extremely sexual, even orgiastic fashion by an older man she is in love with seems to have instantly solved all of this poor girl’s problems. She’s no longer arrogant or cold and now seems totally cool with Chad and the world at large. 

It turns out that all this poor girl needed all along was to be put in her place via a little light BDSM! What a non-psychotic message for a musical for children to impart! Ah, but Blue Hawaii isn’t all spanking and sexuality. There are also a lot of songs

Blue Hawaii finds an excuse for Elvis to sing about every five minutes or so, often about Hawaii itself and its various islands/enchantments. Blue Hawaii’s soundtrack, the second best-selling soundtrack of the 1960s after West Side Story, is all over the place quality-wise. 

Blue Hawaii contains a number of gloriously disposable ditties so spectacularly silly that they would feel equally at home on the soundtrack of an Elvis parody like Top Secret! and in an actual Elvis movie.

But the tenth top grossing film of 1961 also contains a moment of pure, transcendent greatness in a vast universe of cheese in Elvis’ rendition of “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You.”

Director Norman Taurog, who won the Academy Award for Best Director for the 1931 comic book adaptation Skippy and more or less got into the Elvis business for good following Blue Hawaii’s success, directing seven more vehicles in the 1960s, shoots the “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” in a way that blunts its tremendous emotional impact. 

Blue Hawaii presents “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” as the tune inside a music box Chad brings home for his girlfriend’s Hawaiian grandmother as a souvenir of his time in Europe. This means that when Elvis sings it feels like he’s serenading the 78 year old woman sitting between him and his girlfriend rather than a woman who has waited two long years for him to return. 

Because “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” is one of the first songs Elvis sings here it similarly does not have the power it might later on, once we’ve had a chance to get to know these characters. 

Then again, there’s not much to get to know. Blue Hawaii is a film of seductive exteriors and zero depth, a featherweight trifle that would be nothing without Elvis’ effortless charisma and movie star magnetism.

Thankfully Blue Hawaii boasts one of our greatest stars at the height of his extraordinary popularity and appeal. Blue Hawaii is tacky and vulgar and tremendous fun, a riotous romp with nothing on its mind but a good time. 

Blue Hawaii might just have proven too successful. Presley and Taurog would continue flogging this formula in the years ahead to dwindling creative returns. When Elvis made Blue Hawaii fresh out of the army seeing Elvis having fun in an exotic setting still possessed an element of novelty but over the years the charm of what were dismissively referred to as “travelogues” would dwindle along with Elvis’ enthusiasm for making them, and movies in general. 

Unlike superior Elvis vehicles Jailhouse Rock, King Creole and Viva Las Vegas, I wouldn’t describe Blue Hawaii as good, let alone great but if it’s not art Blue Hawaii is nevertheless top-notch entertainment from one of our greatest entertainers.

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