Region 2. Reliance BIG Home Video Rs 699
No sooner did Elvis Presley have his first number one single in 1956 with “Heartbreak Hotel” than he became a sensation. Film studios were quick to cash in and soon enough, Presley was in the movies. In all, the King made 31 films. Though his acting was limited, this two-DVD box set is a good combination of King Creole, his best film, and Blue Hawaii, his most successful.
During his early film career, Presley was fortunate to have decent plots and good directors who played up his bad boy image. King Creole (1958) was directed by Michael Curtiz and based on the Harold Robbins novel A Stone for Danny Fisher. Curtiz had previously made Casablanca, but he was also responsible for a number of gangster flicks for Warner Brothers in the 1930s. He had directed Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G Robinson and other tough guys, and had no trouble getting the best out of Presley. In King Creole, Presley plays Danny Fisher, who has flunked high school a second time. Danny falls in with the wrong crowd, including the obnoxious mobster Maxie Fields (a truly vile Walter Matthau) and his moll Ronnie (Carolyn Fields). Danny also gets a break as a singer at a nightclub run by Fields’s only competitor, Charlie LeGrand. The moody black-and-white photography complements the hopeless situation that Danny finds himself in, while the songs come thick and fast to release the tension. The DVD has a bonus: a never-before seen sequence featuring a stripper that replaces the original scene featuring Presley singing “Hard Headed Woman”.
Presley’s manager, Tom Parker, wanted his ward to become an all-round performer appealing to both the youth and their parents and the result was Blue Hawaii (1961). Presley plays Chadwick Gates, the scion of a family in the fruit business. His mother (Angela Lansbury in a deliciously hammy performance) wants Chad to leave his beach buddies, his Hawaiian girlfriend (Joan Blackman) and handle “responsibilities”. Chad will have none of that, and becomes a tourist guide instead. This results in scenes of Presley cavorting with babes in the sand, breathy songs with a Hawaiian touch, lush tropical locales and the memorable “Can’t Help Falling In Love”. Blue Hawaii made pots of cash, and the die was cast. Presley spent most part of the ’60s making one awful film after another, many of them pale imitations of Hawaii. If only he had paid heed to a line from his own movie: “It’s too easy to fall into a readymade set-up.” Kingshuk Niyogy
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