Tickle Me (1965)

He handles himself very well. Unemployed rodeo rider Lonnie Beale (Elvis Presley) arrives in the desert town of Zuni Wells looking for work on the recommendation of a friend who is nowhere to be found so he starts singing at a club where Vera Radford (Julie Adams) offers him a job handling horses at her Circle-Z ranch. It’s actually a fitness spa filled with young women shaping up and Lonnie follows one of the girls, Pam Merritt (Jocelyn Lane), to a ghost town called Silverado where one of her relatives allegedly buried a treasure. At the Circle-Z she suffers repeated attempted kidnappings when word of her inheritance gets out. She, Lonnie and ranch hand Stanley Potter (Jack Mullaney) re-enact western characters in a parody sequence and Lonnie goes back on the road but his phone calls to Pam go unanswered and his letter is Returned to Sender. Stanley locates Lonnie and they follow Pam to Silverado and a storm ensues and they are pursued by supposed ghosts who really want the treasure … I can see it now:  cowboy marries millionaire divorcee. An unusually playful Elvis comedy thanks to Three Stooges scribes Edward Bernds and Elwood Ulman who apply the rule of slapstick to half the scenes in a film that feels like it’s a year long instead of its sprightly 91 minute running time. Luckily the last third strays into amusing haunted house territory at least making an attempt at a genre workout in a story that suffers from a plethora of studio-bound outdoor scenes which is a pity because when they get into those Jeeps and cut a swathe through the desert it’s quite tolerable fun. Otherwise it’s refreshing in the #MeToo era to see The King being sexually harassed by his lady boss Adams.  The songs are all old recordings and the film saved Allied Artists from bankruptcy. Directed by Norman Taurog. I’ve heard of this happening to secretaries before but this is ridiculous

G.I. Blues (1960)

There is no need to borrow a baby to get into my apartment.  You underestimate your attraction. Stationed in West Germany with the American military, soldier Tulsa McLean (Elvis Presley) hopes to open up a nightclub when he gets out of the army. He lacks the capital for such a venture, but a chance to raise the cash comes his way through a friendly wager with his colleagues. Local dancer Lili (Juliet Prowse) is a notorious ice queen, and Tulsa bets everything he has that a friend of his, Dynamite (Edson Stroll) can earn her affections. But, when Dynamite is dispatched to Alaska, it’s up to Tulsa to melt Lili’s heart and as his friends Cookie (Robert Ivers) and Turk follow the couple and watch Tulsa negotiate his way into Lili’s affections from nearby, a baby enters the picture when Cookie falls for Lili’s Italian roommate Tina (Leticia Roman) … An unremarkable service comedy by screenwriters Edmund Beloin and Henry Garson gets the musical romcom makeover starring the King. This gained traction because of course Elvis Presley was himself stationed in Germany, as part of the post-war occupation, curtailing his musical career. This was the first of nine films in partnership with Norman Taurog and it curdled his screen persona and his film performances thereafter. However it is beloved of many fans precisely because of the echoes in his own life – he finds Blue Suede Shoes by Elvis Presley in a jukebox! – and the songs are outstanding.  There’s some excellent location photography, including on a cable car ride. Juliet Prowse is remarkably charming and her presence alone elevates this in the canon. The King died on this day in 1977. Long live the King!

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

In the face of the fabulous new your thought is to kill it?  Los Angeles 2049. K (Ryan Gosling) is a blade runner for Wallace, the new incarnation of the Tyrell Corporation led by blind Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) whose right hand woman Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) is enchanted by K’s story that a replicant may have had a child. He is ordered by LAPD (in the guise of Robin Wright) to get rid of any evidence that a replicant could have given birth in order to see off a war between replicants and humans. He returns to the site of a dead tree and finds something that makes him think he can remember something from his own childhood and it leads him into a spiral of discovery that involves tracking down his predecessor before Prohibition and the Blackout, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) who appears to have something to do with the rebel replicants underground …. Where to start? This hybridised metafictive spawn of one of the greatest achievements in cinema is no easy ride. The way it looks for one. It’s horrible. Mostly greys with occasional harking back to the navy and neon and a sour yellow, a nod to the burnished autumnal shadings of the original. The Orientalised appearances are now more subtly rendered but are even more prevalent as though mixed into a Caucasian blender. Then there are the women. Luv is clearly meant to remind us of Rachael (Sean Young) while the reference to Nabokov’s Pale Fire is intended to tell us that there are two fictional characters sparring with one another here – but the question is, which two, and of them, who’s real and who’s a replicant? The quasi-Oedipal story steers right into a quagmire of identities and dreams and purported flashbacks. Other quotes – Kafka, Treasure Island, and even the songs that play as holograms in a burned-out Vegas – also serve to get us to look one way, instead of another. The idea of relationships as a figment of your imagination – literally, a hologram – is conceptually brilliant and well executed (in every sense) but takes too long as a narrative device to be told and then unravel. The ending is enormously clever and draws on facets of Philip K. Dick’s own backstory: it’s literally a tidal wash of action and memories. But are they real? Are they implants? Hampton Fancher is back but with co-writer Michael Green this time instead of David Webb Peoples. You can see the spliced DNA with Harlan Ellison (an insistence on procreation) as well as PKD  (what is humanity? what is reality?) and the literary turns which have some good jokes. There are some nice lines too and even if they’re on the nose they actually future proof it somewhat:  You’ve never seen a miracle.  Or, I know it’s real. Or, Dying for the right cause is the most human thing you can do. They actually conceal what is paid off by misdirecting us.  It gets away with its visual tributes to the original cast with the prostitute who looks like Darryl Hannah and Hoeks who clearly resembles Sean Young even in ill-fitting costume.  Directed by Denis Villeneuve who is one of the most audacious mainstream directors at the present time with Ridley Scott producing,  I appreciate what they’re doing here but it’s a pale twenty-first century facsimile, more replicant than human.  Ford enters the fray so late and Gosling is not my favourite actor albeit he acquits himself well as someone who starts to feel things he shouldn’t given his somewhat obscure origins as a police functionary. But I have feelings too. Nothing can compare with the sensory overload that is Blade Runner, the daddy of the species. Notwithstanding the foregoing, as all the best legal minds argue, the ending is brilliant. Oh! The humanity.

Elvis Aaron Presley 8th January 1935 – 16th August 1977

It was forty years ago today that Elvis Presley died. His film career echoed his musical life – the early films were better and some approached classic status:  Jailhouse Rock is a great musical, while his very first performance, in Love Me Tender, was impressive, a reminder that James Dean was his hero. His own favourite film remained King Creole but there were so many afterwards, thanks to the influence of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Some are cult favourites, some are terrible, some are great for kids and thus endeared him to me at an impressionable age (It Happened at the World’s Fair, Paradise Hawaiian Style), while some were instrumental in bringing huge tourist numbers to Hawaii! The better ones like GI Blues have wonderful songs or a great romantic pairing like Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas. Two didn’t have musical numbers at all and he was able to flex his acting muscle – Flaming Star, Wild in the Country – and very good he was too. Just as his musical choices became more baroque, his movies became ropy and questionable albeit some are redeemed by their settings (Speedway) or their lunatic elements (Harum Scarum).  There was one very good late film, with Mary Tyler Moore, Change of Habit, but it’s a very long time since I’ve seen it and would love to reappraise it. His screen legacy has been inherited by the wonderful actress (Danielle) Riley Keough, his granddaughter. But there’s only one Elvis. The King is Dead. Long Live the King.

 

Viva Las Vegas (1964)

Aka Love in Las Vegas. The legendary pairing of The King with Ann-Margret is literally the whole show in a town full of them. Even for an Elvis film the storyline is surprisingly weak but the eye-poppingly colourful scene-setting by supreme stylist George Sidney mitigates the problem. Elvis  is Lucky Jackson, a talented singer and driver whose luck has run out so he’s in Vegas to raise money to take part in the Grand Prix. He sees dancer and swimming instructor Rusty (A-M) and is smitten. But so is his rival, Count Elmo Mancini (Cesare Danova). Lucky and Rusty do some sightseeing around the Hoover Dam – nice helicopter views – and we learn a little about Nevada and her good relationship with her father (William Demarest).  Lucky winds up losing all his money in the hotel pool and having to earn his living as a waiter which leads to some nice slapstick serving Rusty and Elmo. Then his luck turns and there is the climactic race across the desert which is pretty well shot and there are some disasters along the route … The songs are terrific and the sequences of the city and casinos are wonderful. You can see Teri Garr in a bit part as a showgirl at one point but the most surprising element is that this was written by Sally Benson, responsible for Meet Me in St Louis. And then there’s the real-life romance between Elvis and Ann-Margret! In the film they marry at the Little Church of the West, the oldest wedding chapel in Vegas.

True Romance (1993)

How do you describe the 90s bastard child of Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands? Total cool. How easy is that to achieve in a movie? Well it helps to have a script by Tarantino. And to be directed by Tony Scott. And then there’s the beyond-belief cast:  Christian Slater. Patricia Arquette. Gary Oldman. Dennis Hopper.  Christopher Walken. Michael Rapaport.  Brad Pitt. James Gandolfini. Tom Sizemore. Chris Penn. And that’s just the start of it. It’s ridiculous! It Boy Slater is Clarence, the comic book-pop culture geek who falls for the pretty call girl Alabama and makes off with a huge coke haul belonging to her pimp and pisses off a lot of the wrong people. His dad Hopper does the astonishing Sicilian-nigger speech to Walken – and how stunning are all those jaw-dropping monologues, no wonder Tarantino is so beloved by actors. (Rolling Stone called his dialogue ‘gutter poetry.’) When the gangsters come calling the violence is sickening and yet the colour lends it an appropriately ripened comic book quality.  There’s a slamdunk shootout involving Hollywood jerks and practically everyone gets killed but Clarence’s very special mentor keeps him chill. Awesome.