LIGHTS! CAMERA! ELVIS! - Blue Hawaii, Easy Come Easy Go, GI Blues, Girls Girls Girls, King Creole, Fun in Acapulco, Roustabout, Paradise Hawaiian Style

The Lights! Camera! Elvis! DVD Collection: Blue Hawaii (1961), Easy Come Easy Go (1967), GI Blues (1960), Girls Girls Girls (1962), King Creole (1958), Fun in Acapulco (1963), Roustabout (1964) and Paradise Hawaiian Style (1966)

RATING OF COLLECTION: **1/2
INDIVIDUAL FILM RATINGS:
BLUE HAWAII: *
EASY COME EASY GO: *
GI BLUES: *
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS: *
KING CREOLE: ****
FUN IN ACAPULCO: *
ROUSTABOUT: ***
PARADISE HAWAIIAN STYLE: *

By Greg Klymkiw

Paramount Home Video’s contribution to the recent glut of Presley celluloid on the market is a nicely packaged box set entitled: “Lights! Camera! Elvis! Collection”. It is precisely the packaging – a fancy blue suede box that holds the eight movies – which counts as one of two reasons to recommend picking up this title that exploits (I mean, commemorates) the 30th anniversary of the King’s deadly slide off the porcelain throne onto the cool slab of Memphis marble adorning the second floor of Graceland.

The second reason to pick up the box is the inclusion of Mr. Presley’s fine movie – the just-short-of-great King Creole. Based loosely on Harold Robbins’s best-selling pot-boiling trash-lit "A Stone For Danny Fisher" that serves, not surprisingly, as a solid structural coat-hanger to this stylish dark fabric of late-noir. It's a Michael (Casablanca) Curtiz-helmed studio picture that tells the tale of poor-boy Danny Fisher and his rise from the gutter and ultimate acceptance of his loving Dad while battling a sleazy gangster and having to choose between a life of crime or a life of song.

Featuring a terrific supporting cast, King Creole features the delectably sleazy Walter Matthau as the gangster-club-owner who makes Danny’s and pretty much everyone else’s life miserable, a sad and sexy Carolyn Jones as Matthau’s Madonna-whore moll with a heart of gold, a suitably pathetic Dean Jagger as Danny’s loser Dad and the radiant and utterly magical Dolores Hart as Presley’s main love interest. Better yet is Presley’s fine performance. His smouldering screen presence is palpable and he displays a wide range of emotion. If Col. Tom Parker had not so horribly bungled Elvis’s motion picture career, the King might well have joined the ranks of James Dean, Paul Newman and Marlon Brando as one of the truly great angry young men of 50s and 60s celluloid rather than the popular, but ultimately cartoon-like joke he became in later pictures.

The rest of the package is a woeful collection of some of Presley’s worst screen offences – some more risible than others, but risible nonetheless. From the standpoint of picture quality, this collection offers transfers ranging from adequate to first-rate. The lack of extra features (save for original theatrical trailers) is a bit annoying, but only King Creole really suffers from having no additional tidbits to add some informational cherries to the ample and tasty treat of the picture itself. It’d be great to try and score a commentary track (or even extensive interview) from Dolores Hart who, at the age of 25, left the fame and glamour of the movie business to become a nun in the Catholic Church. Even now, she apparently holds the distinction of being the only nun who is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I also think a scholarly commentary would be great with this picture especially since Curtiz’s direction is so first-rate and the late-noir style would also deserve some in-depth analysis.

The other movies in this box include one of Elvis’s biggest hits, the utterly ludicrous travelogue Blue Hawaii which has the dubious distinction of virtually no plot and an annoyingly over-the-top Angela Lansbury offering support. G.I. Blues is a plodding attempt to present Presley’s service experience in an entertaining fashion. Stella Stevens is mouth-wateringly gorgeous in Girls! Girls! Girls! but her character is such a sourball that one is not surprised that Elvis’s eyes may occasionally roam around at the constant bevy of beauties around him. Fun in Acapulco and Paradise Hawaiian Style are both dull and silly travelogues, while Easy Come Easy Gotries to mix it up with some deep-sea diving action to liven up the stale proceedings.

These titles are pretty woeful, but for some they might offer enough nostalgia appeal to warrant sitting through more than once. I, for one, was kind of hoping for at least some melancholic magic that’d bring me back to those halcyon days when I first saw many of these movies as a kid attending the Saturday matinees at a little neighbourhood cinema in my old hometown. Through the gentle haze of childhood recollection, I thought many of these pictures were really wonderful. Alas, they do not hold up to adult scrutiny. Elvis is always cool in the pictures, but it’s alternately depressing seeing this brilliant young actor in material that is so below his talents that all feelings of bygone warm and fuzzies dissipate pretty quickly.

Other than the terrific King Creole, the only other picture in this collection that might warrant more than one viewing is the solid, though unexceptional Roustabout that tells a tale of Elvis amidst some old-time carnies played with classic verve by Barbara Stanwyck and Leif Erickson. This is one movie that might have benefited from having someone or something resembling a director behind the lens as opposed to the dull-as-dishwater competence of John Rich who is, not surprisingly, a veteran television director. He’s a decent enough camera jockey, but it might have been nice to imagine this picture in the hands of someone like Don Siegel or Sam Peckinpah.

Now, I am sure that some might argue that the whole point of the Elvis pictures is to showcase the songs and the King performing them in a variety of locations. This might have been fine in the day, but it’s awfully hard to watch most of what’s in this box set after watching King Creole. It’s not only a good movie with a genuinely good Elvis performance, but the music is presented in a context that does not detract from the noir-ish world Curtiz creates, but actually works within it, not unlike the musical sequences in something like the classic Rita Hayworth picture Gilda. Among a whole mess o’ tuneful crawfish ditties crooned by everyone’s fave lipster, my personal delights were his renditions of the title track, “Trouble” and the get-up-and-boogie “Hard Headed Woman”.

And while this may be hard to believe, many of the other movies don’t actually feature Elvis’s best numbers. They’re always beautifully performed – his voice is smoother than smooth, but tinged with those occasional wild-man highs and lows that can send us to truly orgasmic places – however, many of the songs themselves just plain suck. There’s no polite way of saying it, so allow me to reiterate – they just plain suck! For example, the Blue Hawaii soundtrack features one – count ‘em – one truly legendary song (“Can’t Help Falling In Love”), but I am sure my life will be full if I never again have to hear “Rock-a-Hula Baby”. And yes, I know the album from this picture was probably one of the biggest albums of all-time, but that doesn’t mean most of the songs on it were any good. In G.I. Blues we get to see Elvis sing “Blue Suede Shoes”, but we also have to suffer through numerous musical mediocrities. This is pretty much the case for the rest of the pictures in this box set.

In summation, the “Lights! Camera! Elvis! Collection” presents an interesting look at how a brilliant young actor was used, abused and wasted – especially in light of the great work he displayed in King Creole. If you must own the blue suede box that houses the abovementioned titles, then feel free to pick this collection up. Otherwise, you might do better by just renting Roustabout and purchasing King Creole on its own or waiting until someone issues a special edition of this fine picture. Art thou listening Paramount Home Video? Do Elvis and his fans proud and get cracking on a tasty DVD gumbo of this fabulous movie.

8/28/07

A HOLLIS FRAMPTON ODYSSEY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The legendary experimental American filmmaker is given a magnificent platform via the Criterion Collection to showcase the art Frampton created during his tragically short life.

A Hollis Frampton Odyssey (1966-1979)
dir. Hollis Frampton

*****

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Experimental movies are cool. Or at least they can be. Like any genre, there's good, bad, in-between and yes, great. Traditionally, experimental film has no real concern with narrative and yet, non-narrative experimentation - at least some of the best work - can be as structured as a narrative film that adheres to the Syd Field or Robert McKee approaches to visual storytelling.

Hollis Frampton, subject of the magnificent and insanely exhaustive Criterion Collection Blu-Ray A Hollis Frampton Odyssey was very much a structuralist. Identified as such by P. Adams Sitney, the foremost academic scholar on experimental cinema, Frampton's films would be, according to Sitney, "predetermined and simplified" and that this overall, almost carved-in-stone minimalist structure was what leapt from the formative pre-shooting stage to the film itself.

When one compares this to traditional narrative filmmaking we see in the best work of directors like Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese a not dissimilar approach. All of them will map out precise visual renderings by way of storyboards of the equally worked-out screenplays and, for the most part, adhere strictly to the structure already worked out. While Frampton's work may be structured with seemingly rigid approaches, the final products are often playful and poetic. I'd go so far as to suggest that Spielberg, Hitchcock and Scorsese often utilize elements of play and poetry in their narrative work which, like Frampton, take them well out of the range of machine-tooled cultural "manufacturers".

The road to Hollis Frampton's own odyssey is rooted in the 1920s when experimental cinema began and throughout three decades, seemed to be the exclusive domain of Europeans. Man Ray, Dziga Vertov, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, to name but a few, delivered primarily non-narrative works that were often referred to as avant-garde. These works adhered to movements from the period that included the Surrealists, Dadaists, Lettrists and even, hilariously, Ultra Lettrists.

Whatever movements these filmmakers were part of - the films emphasized impressionism and poetry. At times, the "experiments" revolved exclusively around the medium of film itself, whereas others used the medium to experiment with new ways to express thoughts, ideas, philosophies, political ideology and basic human emotion.

In many cases, especially with Soviets like Sergei Eisenstein, Olexander Dovzhenko and Vsevolod Pudovkin, experimental technique and narrative were married to provide alternative approaches to cinematic storytelling that departed from the Hollywood Machine.

What's especially important to observe, though, is just how important experimental film has been to the medium, the art, the craft of cinema - period. Slavko Vorkapitch, for example, developed any number of cinematic vocabularies that became part and parcel of the Hollywood Machine - Vorkapitch even became the prime mover and shaker of montage in mainstream American filmmaking.

Even clearly populist filmmakers looked to experimental tradition for inspiration. George Lucas, for example, was an adherent and student of the Canadian avant-garde master Arthur Lipsett. Though Lipsett's influence is more obvious in THX-1138, one can find it healthily on display in American Graffiti and the various Star Wars films.

And though there was a smaller tradition in experimental cinema in America, this changed almost overnight in the 1950s when the likes of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Kenneth Anger took the film world by storm. America became a hot bed of avant-garde cinema and yielded two important streams of academic study in the field of "alternative film". The late Black Mountain College was an early post-secondary institute and counted Arthur (Bonnie and Clyde) Penn as one of its most important teachers and of course, there's the world famous San Francisco Art Institute that became the home of teacher/filmmaker George Kuchar. Penn, of course, utilized numerous experimental film techniques in all of his Hollywood features while Kuchar astoundingly looked to Hollywood melodrama - especially that of Douglas Sirk - and fashioned his own transgressive approach to story that was rooted in the mainstream.


Hollis Frampton began his career as a poet and photographer. He subsidized his art by working in an ad agency. Much like the Kuchar Brothers, who also toiled in advertising, Frampton practised and polished elements of basic craft but at the same time, found ways of subverting these elements in his personal work. When Frampton finally began experimenting with film in the mid-1960s, he was poised to embark upon an artistic journey that would render one of the most important bodies of work in cinema history.

A Hollis Frampton Odyssey is, without question, one of the seminal achievements in what could be seen as the ART of home entertainment creation, production and distribution. Assembling, restoring and providing a wealth of supplemental materials focusing upon this visionary and highly influential artist has been rendered with such loving care that Criterion continues to maintain their well-deserved reputation of going above and beyond the call of duty in their service to preserving the art of cinema (rivalled only by that of Milestone Film and Video whose recent commitment to the work of Lionel Rogosin and their ongoing restoration of silent cinema also places them in this pantheon).

The Criterion disc places 24 of Frampton's films in three sections comprising "Early Works" (including his groundbreaking feature film Zorns Lemma, films from his Hapax Legomena cycle and several key works from the stunning, though sadly unfinished Magellan cycle.

The early works are probably going to be the most decidedly challenging films for the uninitiated to get through, but in them, we see the beginnings of Frampton's exploration between sound and image that he eventually tackled full force in Hapax Legomena and there are (at least for me) considerable visual and experiential pleasures to be found in Process Red, Carrots & Peas and Lemon.

Watching the disc from beginning to end speaks volumes of the care taken by the Criterion team to curate the films. The cumulative effect of screening the early short works prior to watching the feature length Zorns Lemma ultimately yields the riches inherent in the said early titles, but also delivers a perfect platform to succumb to the sheer, unadulterated joy to be found in Frampton's feature.

Zorns Lemma has the distinction of being the first experimental film to screen at the prestigious New York Film Festival - a tradition boldly continued to this day. The festival is both elitist and populist in the same breath as it showcases a small, exclusive number of works while at the same time aiming, as an "audience" festival to pack the house at Lincoln Centre. Films as groundbreaking as Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris and as delicate and sensory as the short experimental work URDA/Bone by Charles Officer and Ingrid Veninger have unspooled upon the NY Film Festival's screens.

As a producer myself, my New York Film Festival experience with Guy Maddin and our collaboration on Careful, the wholly insane camp homage to German expressionism, Leni Riefenstahl and the "mountain" films of Dr. Arnold Fanck, was something I'll never forget. Thousands of film lovers eye-balling something so out-of-step with contemporary cinema was utterly goose-flesh-inspiring. So much so, I'd have gladly donated a testicle (or two) to be present for the NYFF's screening of Zorns Lemma.

Frampton's feature is structured in three parts. The first has Joyce Wieland reading from a scary, imposing Puritan text book for young children - used to teach reading and writing with any number of fire and brimstone Old Testament references. The second and longest section is a mind boggling montage of letters and words, bouncing from still frames to moving images and focusing primarily upon a rigid adherence to alphabetical formalism as we're treated to a delightful series of actual New York City signs. The third section, after the first two is heartbreaking and profoundly moving as we see a couple in the distance walking slowly and endlessly through a field of snow.

The Hapax Legomena films are a perfect bridge from Zorns Lemma to the Magellan cycle. The former dives headlong into Frampton's obsession with the relationship between image and sound (and provides an unofficial Frampton autobiography to boot), while the latter presents works of extraordinary poetic lyricism and playful qualities as Frampton circumnavigates the world through the world of cinema, much like the famed explorer Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe during the early part of the 16th century.

Experimental cinema - especially in this package of Hollis Frampton's works - should always first be viewed experientially. Just sitting back and letting "IT" happen to you is not only pleasurable, but at times becomes impossible to do and you find yourself mysteriously and surprisingly engaged in a form of dialogue with the film. Frampton not only brilliantly EXPLORES the relationship between film and audience, but creates a relationship in and of itself.

Hollis Frampton died at the age of 48 from cancer. He was plucked from us far too early. The Magellan films, once complete, would have provided an epic work based upon the calendrical cycle and as such, would have delivered one movie for every day of the year.

Seriously, if this isn't cool, nothing is.

"A Hollis Frampton Odyssey" is available on Blu-Ray and DVD via the Criterion Collection. The restoration and picture transfers are stunning and happily, the sound is presented in uncompressed mono - the way it should be experienced. The extra features - many of which include interviews, footage and "commentary" from Frampton himself - are a treasure trove of insight into the artist and his extraordinary work. If you've never seen Frampton's work, or haven't for a long time, I highly suggest watching all the films first - from beginning to end before you dive into any of them extras. Let your senses and intellect mingle with his art. Get to know the artist through his work first - THEN get to know him with the terrific additional features. Most importantly, those who care deeply about film should NOT rent this. BUY IT!!!

A NOTE TO CRITERION: PLEASE DO GEORGE KUCHAR! I BEG OF YOU!