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On the 50th anniversary of the release of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii,” Harley Payette explores how the success of the film and the soundtrack album changed the direction of Elvis’ career.

On November 22 1961, Elvis Presley’s eighth film “Blue Hawaii” was released. It would be one of the great multi-media coups of the mid-20th century and arguably the most commercially successful project of the singer/actor’s career. By the time the year was out, the film would earn enough money to make the #2 spot on Variety’s weekly list of top grossing films and enough to finish at #18 for the entire year despite the fact that it was released with only five weeks left. In 1962 the film would do even better, finishing as the #14 film for that year.

The “Blue Hawaii” soundtrack reached #1 in December where it would reside without a break for the next five months, setting a record for a rock artist that would last 16 years. The single from the film “Can’t Help Falling in Love/Rock a Hula Baby” was all over the radio and would peak at #2 in early 1962 and eventually top the charts in the UK.

The lead side would become one of the most iconic titles introduced by Presley and would later serve as the climax to all of his live appearances.

“Can’t Help Falling in Love” – Elvis Presley

This was the most dominant showing by Presley or any other artist since he had turned the world upside down in his breakthrough year of 1956. In that year he had also dominated television, but arguably 1961 was even sweeter because no one in 1956 expected Presley to be around five years later. Yet here he was as big, if not bigger, than ever. Strangely, instead of serving as a springboard for even greater achievements, the very enormity of the project’s success would derail the singer artistically and commercially.

Part of the reason that “Blue Hawaii” led to Presley’s eventual mid-decade artistic and commercial decline was the fact that all the success was based upon a very slight product. For all its considerable virtues, it was a lightweight film; a well crafted but not especially inspired Hollywood product that served as the model for progressively weaker copies that came to define Presley as a movie star and as a recording artist for much of the decade.

Things didn’t have to turn out that way. Having proven Presley’s staying power and massive commercial potential, the success of “Blue Hawaii” could have been a base upon which the Presley organization could have built more ambitious work. The trouble was that the success of the film and LP did not come in a vacuum. They were not Presley’s only offerings to the market place in the early 1960s. When he was first released from the army, he embarked on some of the most ambitious work of his career.

Presley’s initial LP upon exiting the service, “Elvis is Back,” is widely considered to be his definitive statement within the medium. The LP contained all of the styles that Elvis favored and featured a handful of first rate new songs – “Dirty Dirty Feeling,” “It Feels So Right,” “Thrill of Your Love,” “Like a Baby” – and some of the greatest blues, rock and vocal group songs from the previous decade – “Fever,” “Reconsider Baby,” “I Will Be Home Again,” and “Soldier Boy.”

The arrangements and production on “Elvis is Back” were thoughtful and adventurous. Presley’s singing was amongst his most passionate and assured, moving between styles with a casual ease that made the listener not even notice a leap had been made. It was without doubt one of the handful of essential rock LPs from the pre-Beatles era.

“Reconsider Baby” – Elvis Presley

Yet for all that, “Elvis is Back” did not sell particularly well. The record’s initial sales of just under 300,000 (it has since been certified Gold) were good enough to get it to the #2 slot for almost three weeks in the summer of 1960. However, this was a disappointment for Presley, his manager “Colonel” Tom Parker, and the RCA record label for several reasons. One was that the initial sales were lower than those of any original Presley LP to that point, save the “King Creole” soundtrack, which had been broken up into separate EP releases prior to its release, and the Christmas LP, which only competed for store space during the final six weeks of the year. The majority of Elvis’ early LPs sold 350,000 or more, with LPs like 1956’s “Elvis” selling more than 500,000, an extremely impressive number for the era. The music on those LPs sold a lot more because, as they did with “King Creole,” RCA simultaneously offered all or a majority of the tracks on those LPs broken up into a series of EPs. This made sense because in 1956 the LP was very much a luxury format and relatively few people, especially few teens, could afford LPs or even had a record player that could accommodate them. By 1960 this had changed, with more people buying LPs than ever before and EPs starting to fade from the market place. For the first time the contents of an Elvis Presley LP were exclusively available on that LP, and that album was Presley’s first new offering in more than two years. In this context, 300,000 units was a huge disappointment.

The King’s next LP “GI Blues” gave a hint at what was commercially possible for the LP format. It sold 700,000 copies domestically in only its first few months of release, more than any Presley LP in its original run to that point. It logged up a run of ten weeks at the pole position and spent 111 weeks on the Billboard Top 200, to this day a record for a Presley album. Musically, it was a lion’s leap backwards from “Elvis is Back” and the majority of his catalogue to that point.

Although the “GI Blues” soundtrack contained some fine songs, most notably “Pocketful of Rainbows,” and “Doing the Best I Can,” and was brilliantly performed by Presley throughout, the majority of the songs were lightweight pop. Worse, a number of the songs were script-based novelties not intended to really have a life outside the film, let alone as the latest contributions from the hottest singer in the business. Elvis found some life in a few of these (“Frankfort Special” springs to mind) but it was mostly a losing battle.

“Pocketful of Rainbows” – Elvis Presley

Priscilla Beaulieu, Presley’s wife from 1967-1973, remembered that Elvis was extremely displeased with the songs from the film. By contrast, writer Paul Simpson noted that the copy of “Elvis is Back” contained in Elvis’ personal record collection at Graceland had been played so often that it had almost turned white – an amazing verdict on this music from a man who generally didn’t care to listen to his own recordings. The album Elvis did not want to record had sold more than twice the number of the album that he had played into the ground.

The film, a lightweight service concoction that could have just as easily starred Dean Martin, Dick Haymes or Bing Crosby or any of a dozen other talents from a previous generation, was almost as successful. Despite being released in late November it finished as the 14th highest grossing film of 1960 and out performed every Elvis film to that time, save the debut “Love Me Tender.” Elvis didn’t like it any better than he did the soundtrack and soon got himself into something more exciting.

“Flaming Star” and “Wild in the Country,” his next two films, were as ambitious for Elvis the actor as his initial recording sessions were for him as a recording artist. The former was a project originally tailored for Marlon Brando and directed by screen legend in the making Don Siegel. Its main theme was racism, one of the defining issues of the era. The latter was a coming-of-age drama written by the great playwright Clifford Odets. Both had stellar supporting casts. Arguably they were the most demanding dramatic projects that Presley had ever undertaken. (As it turned out, he would never do anything on screen more challenging.) Unlike “King Creole,” the film that had previously offered Presley a dramatic test, there was almost no music in these two films.

In “Flaming Star,” Presley sings only one song after the opening credits and that is five minutes into the movie. “Wild in the Country” features a mere two songs after the credits along with a brief a cappella snippet. While 1956’s “Love Me Tender” was not stocked wall-to-wall with songs, Elvis’ role was a supporting one. In these films, he was the lead. The rising actor was working without a net.

So, fresh out of the army Presley re-established himself as a creative force in the recording studio and strove to establish himself as a true actor. Unfortunately, although both films made a modest profit, these were the first Elvis films that were not full fledged box office hits. Elvis did receive some positive notices in the era for his performances in both projects but there weren’t enough of them and the ones that were there weren’t vociferous enough to make the industry take notice. The same could be said about the films themselves. (Subsequent critics have been much more appreciative of the singer’s work in these movies, if not always the movies themselves.)

Since there were so few songs, the music from “Flaming Star” and “Wild in the Country” was basically a washout commercially, especially in comparison to previous Presley projects. The title track of “Flaming Star” served as the lead of an EP that made #14 and the title track of “Wild in the Country” made #26 as B-side. Some of the music from the movies, including deleted songs, wouldn’t even be available in stores for years.

Worse for Elvis was the fact that “Something For Everybody,” his first LP full of secular songs after “GI Blues,” made #1 but sold only 300,000 units, a success for the era but a tremendous disappointment after the dizzying heights of “GI Blues.”

Even the 45 RPM single no longer seemed the sure bet for Presley that it once had been. Elvis’s first four singles after returning home from the service (“Stuck on You,” “It’s Now or Never,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and “Surrender”) all topped the charts with more than a million units; in fact the middle two singles were amongst the most successful that the singer ever made. “Are You Lonesome To-Night?” moved a million copies in its first week of release and “It’s Now or Never” was Presley’s all time international best seller. Unlike LP or movie audiences, the Top 40 mainstream seemed initially willing to move with Presley.

Then he followed “Surrender” with a remake of Chuck Willis’ “I Feel So Bad” (backed with “Wild in the Country”), a tormented blues that followed the construction of Willis’ 1956 R&B hit closely. Switching from ballads to blues cost Presley dearly. “I Feel So Bad” moved 600,000 units in its nine week Billboard chart run. This was good enough to make #5 but it was the fewest records any mainline Presley 45 had sold since the singer had started with RCA in 1956. (This would be the smallest run for a Presley single until 1964.)

Undeterred, Presley switched again on his next release, moving back to rock with one of the all time greatest two-sided releases in the history of rock ‘n’ soul, “(Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame”/ “Little Sister.” Audiences liked the rock n’ roll Elvis more than the blues Elvis, buying up about 750,000 records and pushing both titles into the Top Ten. Even that success was modest compared to the million plus that Presley had grown accustomed to prior to 1961 and was a blip compared to the two million plus of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”

“(Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame” – Elvis Presley

“Blue Hawaii” single-handedly stopped this downward trend in the record shops, and at the box office. “Can’t Help Falling in Love”/ “Rock a Hula Baby” obliterated the one million units mark in quick time. The soundtrack was the fastest selling album of the year by any artist. By the end of 1962, it had moved more than two million units, completely quashing the mark established by “GI Blues.” It would go on to move more than three million copies, making it the biggest selling LP within Presley’s lifetime.

The “Blue Hawaii” LP not only set a standard for Presley, it set a standard for the industry in general. The 20 weeks it spent at #1 were the most for any LP since the “South Pacific” soundtrack in 1958. In the decade of the 1960s, only the movie soundtrack for “West Side Story,” released almost simultaneously, spent more time at #1 (an incredible 54 weeks over the decade). In the next 25 years only four LPs had more time at the top. It was an incredible run. Although this was not a rock ‘n’ roll LP, no rock ‘n’ roller at that point had ever touched these type of numbers in total sales or weeks on the chart.

At the box office, “Blue Hawaii” wasn’t as much of an industry smashing event, but Jerry Hopkins noted that the film grossed as much as beloved classics like “Gunfight at the OK Corral” and “Pal Joey.” He also pointed out that Variety placed the movie on its all time list of box office champions.

If “Blue Hawaii” had not so significantly influenced what Elvis did next, its mind boggling success would have been one of those little curious blips in history, where a relatively mild work presses the button of a generation and leaves subsequent generations scratching their heads. However, its massive success made it the model for Presley’s career for years to come, stifling his artist growth and changing the potential face of popular music.

Despite what you may have heard, or where you think this piece might be leading, “Blue Hawaii” the film and the soundtrack are not without value even today. The soundtrack is dazzlingly sung and performed with several highlights, not only “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” one of the best and most loved performances of Presley’s entire career, but also a lovely version of “Hawaiian Wedding Song,” a rendition of “Blue Hawaii” that matches Crosby’s in its wistful quality, a commanding performance of “No More” (a rewrite of the Spanish song “La Paloma”), and the gorgeous underrated movie song “Hawaiian Sunset.” But even on the slightest pieces there is no mistaking the precision of Elvis’ singing or the mellifluous quality of his voice. At its worst, it’s still pleasant. Even when things get absurd, Presley and his band elevate it to an enjoyable level.

“No More” – Elvis Presley

The film has those songs. It also has gorgeous scenery capturing many of the most beautiful sights of the Islands. There’s a solid supporting cast to augment its appealing leading man, at his most physically beautiful. The colors are sharp and vibrant. There are also numerous scantily clad beautiful women. On a winter’s day, it can be a very reasonable escape. Many critics have even compared the film to a postcard.

Movies though are not postcards and postcards are not something upon which a young recording artist and actor wants to build his career. The big problem with “Blue Hawaii” the movie is that not a whole heck of a lot happens. Most of the musical numbers are presented in a straightforward, unimaginative manner. The plot is scant, and outside of a fight and a few songs, there’s not really any memorable incidents in the leisurely paced flick.

Ironically, one of the problems with the soundtrack is that some of the songs are tailored to the movie’s modest events. One memorable moment, Elvis sings a song to a friend with a hearty appetite leading to a level of absurdity that no Presley recording had previously reached. Given that the film had a couple of other novelties that could have qualified for that position, that wasn’t good news. And although performing in the Hawaiian motif gave the artist some variety and challenge, much of the soundtrack was as safe and uneventful as the film. A modest rocker like “Almost Always True” was guaranteed not to offend anyone, but also not to overly excite anyone either. This was not something you could say about Presley’s earlier rock ‘n’ roll songs, even something as contrived as 1958’s “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.”

What’s more, the film completed Presley’s drift away from his roots. In one scene, Elvis is seen spanking a teenage girl that gets out of line, a girl who was the age of Elvis’ then core audience members. He makes it clear, “We are no longer the same.”

The character Elvis plays is a young rich man whose only worry is that his life will be too easy for him. This is a long way from the working class hero of the 1950s, created mutually by the cultures of disenfranchised whites and blacks. This move away from his roots alienated a large part of those audiences even as it picked a whole host of new fans.

But it was more than the overwhelming popularity of the milder more mainstream Presley that made “Blue Hawaii” the model for the rest of Elvis’ 1960s work. It was also the fact that the audience was no longer responding to the more challenging figure he had been to that point. The reception to his most recent studio LPs and 45s demonstrated that, although support for that type of artistry still existed, it was dwindling and was now completely dwarfed by the cleaner, less demanding performer. The ambitious films that Presley made before this told an even worse story. Outside of the relatively large base that would see Presley in anything, there was complete public indifference.

The Presley organization led by his manager “Colonel” Tom Parker got the idea that the more ambitious stuff was not worth promoting. That there were alternate reasons for the relative disappointments seemed to be something that no one, even Elvis, seemed to comprehend. Perhaps “(Marie’s the Name of) His Latest Flame,”/”Little Sister” failed to move a million because the singles market was in a downturn. Perhaps “Can’t Help Falling in Love” zoomed past it because it was one of those rare records that just happened to grab vast swaths of the public, even the people who normally don’t make it to record stores. Perhaps its placement on the soundtrack album was a key in making that LP such a commercial juggernaut.

Maybe it’s why it more than doubled “GI Blues.” That album was advertised via the film but featured no hit singles. The lack of hit singles was a trait shared with the three studio LPs of the era. Although Presley had a string of hit singles in the early 1960s, none of these singles were on an album. This fact alone may explain the relatively low commercial impact of the studio LPs.

Albums in the 1960s, although cheaper than they had been a few years prior, were still relatively high ticket items (priced at about the equivalent of $20 today) and the teen audience for rock ‘n’ roll, while certainly much richer than its predecessors, did not have quite the level of disposable income they possess today. (And even today kids don’t like to spend that kind of coin on CDs.) Buying an LP was a big decision. Fans had to make sure they would like the songs on an album before they bought it. If it contained one or more hit singles, they knew they were ahead of the game. If they recognized all the songs, as many did with the Presley movies, then that was even better. So, an LP like “Blue Hawaii” was advertised on the radio and at the movies. The only way you knew anything about “Elvis is Back” was by gazing at the song titles on the back, buying it, taking it home and spinning it up.

There was no denying that audiences found the light entertainment of “Blue Hawaii” palatable. Yet if Presley and Parker had examined the wreckage of the two dramatic projects they could have come up with alternate explanations for the demise of those projects as well, other than a sheer rejection of Presley and drama. “Wild in the Country,” for instance, was not a very good movie, slowly paced and over-written. Had it been a truly exciting film, perhaps word of mouth would have created audiences. And both films did indeed make money, only relative failures. Perhaps Elvis could have traded off the more ambitious projects like these (as long as they covered costs) with lighter musicals. Sadly, team Presley was incapable of such introspection and took the disparity in success between the dramatic projects and the lighter musicals as direct marching orders from the public.

Elvis began the next year with one of his lightest ever singles, “Good Luck Charm,” which zoomed to #1, but he had not yet gone whole hog. The first two films of the year, “Follow That Dream” and “Kid Galahad,” were kind of hybrid projects which attempted to marry the musical format with layered narratives. There were about half as many songs as featured in the conventional Presley musicals but about twice as many as appeared in the dramas. The commercial results were middling at the box office and in the record shops.

The year closed with the movie “Girls, Girls, Girls,” a sort of sideways sequel or partner to “Blue Hawaii.” Like “Blue Hawaii,” the movie was a big hit, although not as big as that film. The soundtrack again contained a hit single, “Return to Sender,” which was Elvis’ biggest hit of the year, and again the LP easily outstripped Presley’s lone studio album of the year (which predictably contained no hit singles). Again, though, the LP was a much, much smaller hit than “Blue Hawaii.” This was because it wasn’t as good. There were fewer highlights in the soundtrack. There were more novelty or goofy songs. The pop was a little bit less substantial. Presley’s roots were further away and while he was still committed he was just a hair less inspired than he had been the last time out.

The plot of “Girls, Girls, Girls” was a little less demanding than the already not too taxing story of “Blue Hawaii.” The supporting cast wasn’t as good. Seen for the second time in two years, the scenery didn’t seem quite as impressive. In every way, it was a fuzzy copy of a not inspired original. And Presley, his handlers and the studios opted to release further copies of this copy for the next five years.

Elvis made 13 consecutive musicals in that time. Twelve of his next 14 albums of previously unavailable material were film soundtracks based upon the “Blue Hawaii” format, but invariably inferior. The formula was so ingrained that even when Presley went into the studio to record new tracks for traditional LPs, those songs were used as “bonuses” to pad out the soundtracks. Even his slate of singles became dominated by film soundtrack songs, including even film novelty songs.

This all resulted in tracks like “Do the Clam,” “Kissin’ Cousins,” and “Long Legged Girl With the Short Dress On” as Presley’s latest offerings to the pop singles chart. It also resulted in LPs like “Harum Scarum,” “Paradise Hawaiian Style,” and “Double Trouble” filled with songs like “Shake That Tambourine,” “A Dog’s Life,” “Queenie Wahine’s Papaya,” “I Love Only One Girl,” “Old MacDonald” and other titles that made “Rock-a-Hula Baby” seem like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by comparison, at a time when the rest of the industry was in a creative renaissance.

Commercially the strategy worked for a few years. “Viva Las Vegas,” one of the few films that mildly tweaked the formula mostly through the presence of white hot co-star Ann-Margret, became Presley’s all time top grosser in 1964. The following year, three of his films made the year’s Top 25. Early in that year, the soundtrack to one of those films, “Roustabout,” became his fourth number one LP of the decade and his last for eight years. Until 1966, all of the soundtrack LPs made the Top Ten and they would continue to make the Top 20 until 1967. The soundtrack singles became slightly less successful, moving roughly the same as his few studio releases of the era, although his biggest hit was a dusted off unreleased studio nugget from 1960 “Crying in the Chapel.”

By the end of 1967, the wheels had fallen off. Presley’s latest singles made the numbers put up by “I Feel So Bad” look spectacular. His LPs took a similar nosedive and his films were struggling just to make back their costs. The subsequent years had convinced the movie industry that Presley had nothing to offer artistically or commercially. Worse, the very thriving, creative and newly self-consciously self-serious pop music audience had assumed the same thing. With a thrilling television show at the end of 1968, Elvis would prove that criticism was wrong musically. But, a substantial portion of the new youth audience would never accept him back into the fold. This was a shame as Presley could have used their support for some of his more adventurous later efforts like 1971’s “Elvis Country,” an honest to gosh concept album and a great one. The LP passed though as just another Elvis album diminishing any chances for a follow up or for even good scholarship on the project’s origins.

Presley also wound up losing several prime years as a recording artist, years that if the singer could have made all the right moves, could have possibly changed the industry. Although there were definite pockets of quality here and there, Elvis’ late 20s and early 30s wound up mostly devoted to lackluster “for hire” work rather than a pursuit of the singer’s own ambitions. At 30 in 1965, it was unlikely that Elvis was going to compete head to head with the younger and fresher Beatles and all the acts that followed them. Each generation needs its own heroes. Commercially, many of Elvis’ peers, including ones who followed the contemporary trends like the Everly Brothers, were unable to even register, at least in their home country. And there’s not even a guarantee that left to his own devices, Presley would have been able to capitalize on the creative spirit of the era. All artists are bound to slump, popular artists especially, and Elvis had some other problems beyond his movie career. Many fans would also argue that Presley’s mid-60s struggles provided a lot of the fire that drove the singer’s renaissance at the end of the decade. Without those struggles, those later triumphs may not have occurred. Still it would have been nice to see him try and to see the impact that would have resulted from such an effort.

If the King ever thought about it, he’d have probably laughed at the irony of it all. His career and ambitions were driven off the track by the one thing that many popular artists covet but very few obtain: An industry defining hit. The cliché says “Be careful what you wish for, you might receive it.” It was a lesson that Elvis Presley lived.

Sources:
Elvis Day by Day: Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen
Elvis: A Biography: Jerry Hopkins
Billboard’s Pop Annual 1955-1999 – Joel Whitburn
Top Pop Albums 1955-1985- Joel Whitburn