1962, United States. Starring Elvis Presley, Stella Stevens, Jeremy Slate, Laurel Goodwin, Benson Fong, Robert Strauss, Guy Lee, Frank Puglia, Lili Valenty, Beulah Quo. Directed by Norman Taurog.

It would only be a matter of time before we once again saw Elvis frolicking on the sands of Waikiki in those little swimming trunks that were so popular back in the day. Elvis managed to pack three more movies into a single year when 1962 saw him star as a good-natured buffoon in the little-talked-about Follow That Dream, take on the role of a boxer in a remake of the 1937 Edward G. Robinson film Kid Galahad, and mount a not-entirely-triumphant return to surf and sand in Girls! Girls! Girls!

Elvis plays his usual character: a young guy looking to make it on his own. In this case, he's Ross Carpenter, captain of a charter fishing boat owned by a kindly Eastern European couple. Ross harbors dreams of one day having enough money to be able to purchase the sleek sailboat he and his late father built together, which was later sold to the same Eastern European couple. They are kind enough to let Ross take the boat out for a spin whenever he wants and even live on it, but when one of the couple falls ill, they must move to a dryer climate and sell off their boats - including Ross' dream. A rude businessman comes into the picture as a potential buyer, and Elvis woos a young woman who he doesn't realize is rich enough to buy the boat for him - not that his pride would ever allow him to accept such an offer. Any attempt to do so simply triggers one of the patented "I gotta make it on my own" speeches that were de rigueur for Elvis movies.

That's about as much of a plot as you could hope for in a post-Blue Hawaii Elvis movie. Every movie cast him as a down-on-his-luck outcast with a tough exterior and a heart of gold, who just needs to devise one ingenious plan to make his humble dreams come true.


Girls! Girls! Girls! wastes no time getting Elvis to sing. The opening credits see The King perched precariously on the front of his speeding fishing boat, snapping his fingers and belting out the theme song with full accompaniment by the phantom band that seemed to follow him around in all his movies to provide back up music to his singing, no matter how rustic and remote the setting for the song may be. The song isn't especially bad, but it's not especially good either, which describes most of the songs in the film. Only "Return to Sender" stands out among the crowd of otherwise forgettable tunes, including the puzzling "Song of the Shrimp," a heartfelt ballad about a little shrimp who valiantly gives his life up in order to make a bowl of shrimp creole taste just right. Elvis does a lot of the "finger snap and wiggly hand shake" stuff this time around, and it's odd once again seeing him perform for delighted middle aged onlookers when he was previously considered so taboo by the same. It's almost as if their smiles aren't smiles of appreciation, but are instead victorious sneers generated by the fact that they won. They took Elvis and tamed him.

Elvis sings a lot, as he tended to do, even more so than in Blue Hawaii. At least in that film, they'd always put a couple lines of dialogue between songs. There are times here where Elvis goes from one musical number to the next without so much as a word in between to break things up. When he's forced to take a job as a nightclub singer to help raise money to buy back his boat, he gets to sing even more. It's in the nightclub setting that he comes into frequent contact with a former flame with a huge chip on her shoulder, played by the drop-dead beauty Stella Stevens. She has absolutely nothing to do here other than snap at Elvis, pout, and, well, I guess that's about all she has to do here. Her character has no point. There's no spot in the movie where she has a sudden realization or does something that redeems or even explains her character's presence. She just shows up from time to time to nag Elvis for a while, then walks off.

The focal point of Elvis' attention is Laurel Goodwin as Laurel Dodge, a rich girl pretending to be poor so she can find true love - to bad she never met up with Elvis' character from Clambake (where he plays a rich boy pretending to be poor in order to find true love). Laurel's acting job is adequate and her character has more meat to it than Stella's, but she's still pretty boring. I guess the producers of an Elvis film wanted to fill them with beautiful ladies to attract the guys, but not make them so interesting that female audience members couldn't turn up their noses and think, "What does he see in her?" Incidentally, for a movie called Girls! Girls! Girls! and featuring a theme song about how Elvis runs wild chasing the skirts, there are only two in the movie, at least up until the finale when girls come out of the woodwork for no reason other than it's the big film-closing musical number.

Another of the problems with Girls! Girls! Girls! comes from the attempts in all of Elvis' films to bring him down off the mountain and pass him off as just a regular Joe with regular Joe problems. Elvis came from this background, and he has enough charm and natural charisma that you're willing to go with the flow and accept him as a down-on-his-luck fisherman who just needs a break. But every time he opens his mouth to sing, Elvis' voice comes out. This is not the voice of a struggling musician, and Elvis' real life is the perfect example of why this just doesn't work. He was poor and struggling, but when he opened his mouth and started singing, it wasn't long before he skyrocketed to fame. It's hard to imagine a guy that can sing like that performing for a crowd of twenty in some dockside nightclub. Wouldn't word eventually get around that a guy with a voice that could make him the next king of rock 'n' roll was performing down at the wharf?


But I guess part of the fun with Elvis movies is believing that he can have normal problems just like the rest of us. Hey! If Elvis has girl troubles and works a crappy job for a jerk of a boss, then my life must not be so bad either! Sure I may not have his hair, or his looks, or his signing voice, or his undeniable charisma and Southern Boy charm, but other than that we're a lot alike.

But these are the least of Girls! Girls! Girls! offenses. First and foremost on the list of crimes is the inclusion of the Chinese family who inhabit Ross' beloved Paradise Cove. What you have here is an attempt by the filmmakers to provide the film with believable, human characters that don't pander to the Hollywood stereotype of Asians, which at the time was confined primarily to Suzie Wong types and Japanese kamikaze pilots. Their hearts were in the right place when they tried to create a sympathetic Asian family who treat Ross (Elvis!) like their own son. Again, shades of Elvis' real life shine through the material here, since he was very close to black musicians and his black housekeeper. Unfortunately, their hearts were in the right place but they were still woefully wrong-headed in their approach, not unlike Elvis who, despite his appreciation for blacks and their music, never did much to promote them as the source for his inspiration, keeping them in his shadow or making food at Graceland. His heart was in the right place, but a man in his position could have, probably should have, done more.

Rather than learn anything about what actual Chinese families and customs might be like, the scriptwriters apparently turned to the age-old nonsense of Rogers and Hammerstein musicals. Thus, every moment of dignity is undermined a scene later when "oriental" music begins and two little girls do that thing where they smile big, waggle their head, fold their arms in front of them, and shuffle around taking those tiny little baby steps. Did anyone in the history of China every do this? I know some of those old dresses were a bit confining and women took small steps, but this is ridiculous. You never saw Bruce Lee do that. And did Chinese Americans really address everyone as "honorable mother" or "honorable father" or "honorable king of rock and roll who just wants to make it as a fisherman?" It's telling that almost all the Asian actors who appear in the Paradise Cove scenes were extras (no one is going to shell out for stars like Nancy Kwan) in 1961's Flower Drum Song, another attempt by non-Asian filmmakers (or playwrights, I suppose) to accurately portray Asian culture. Both Flower Drum Song and Girls! Girls! Girls! get points for trying, especially since it was such a rarity to see any film at all that attempted to deal with Asians as something more than laundromat owners or cooks, but a little more attention to reality and a little less to the pageantry of musicals would have made for a much better experience.

Nothing on display in Girls! Girls! Girls! is so outrageous as to send someone into a fit of anger, but there are definitely some moments where you have to roll your eyes. The film mercifully avoids the "flied lice" linguistic humor, but there are enough "ah so!" moments in the film to really make a lad wince. I wince not so much because it's another example of Asian culture warped through the lens of ignorant American cinema. I wince because you can tell despite the gong music that the writers were trying really hard to avoid all the stereotypes and racial pitfalls, but they just didn't succeed.

On the flipside, where else are you going to hear Elvis Presley sing in Chinese and watch him do the little walk?

Elvis' acting is about par for the course. The material doesn't work for him as well as it did in Blue Hawaii, and from time to time we get glimpses of his weaknesses in front of the camera. He still oozes charm and sex appeal though, and since his heart was still in the game in this point, that's enough to carry him to an enjoyable if not shining performance. This movie also lacks the top-notch supporting cast of Blue Hawaii, but no one here is awful. Jeremy Slate as Wesley Johnson, the scummy businessman who buys Elvis' dream boat out from under him, is as rotten as a character can be without actually being evil. As far as smarmy businessmen jerks go, he's got it nailed. Stella Stevens and Laurel Goodwin we've covered already. Stella went on to appear in the Matt Helm spy spoof The Silencers alongside Dean Martin, The Poseidon Adventure, and has worked and continues to work steadily since then. Goodwin all but disappeared shortly after her role here. She made a couple more movies, appeared in "The Cage" episode of Star Trek, and that seems to be about it. Benson Fong and Beulah Quo as Mr. And Mrs. Yung lead the Asian cast (which also consists of Guy Lee, who starred as the horribly named Ping Pong in Blue Hawaii, and child actors Ginny, Elizabeth, and Alexander Tiu). Scenes between the adults are not bad at all, and anyone who has spent time in a Chinese household will recognize that the film's more authentic moments come amid the banter between these two. It's only when the kids come running on screen that the film breaks out the Chinese pajamas and goofy music. The kids aren't bad as actors, though about all they do here is giggle and sing.


Taurog's direction this time out is fairly uninspired. Competent but uninspired - a description that seems fitting for an Elvis movie. There's very little of his sweeping love affair with Hawaii as seen in Elvis' last Polynesian adventure. The direction attempts to reflect Ross Carpenter's (remember, that's who Elvis plays!) bum situation. Frankly, I'd prefer if the film opened up a little and wasn't so studio-bound, but I guess with so many films being produced so quickly, they had to cut costs somewhere, and the somewhere this time out was the scenery. Though the promotional material references Elvis being back in Hawaii, there's little on display to clue you in to the location. Most of the action takes place on board a boat, in a nightclub, or down at the docks. It might as well be New Orleans with all the seedy wharf nightclubs and shrimp boat fishing.

Director Norman Taurog would indulge himself endlessly in sweeping travelogue photography for both Blue Hawaii and 1966's Paradise Hawaiian Style, but that sort of pandering to dramatic scenery is missing here. Only the sequences set in Paradise Cove have any Hawaiian feel to them. I guess he figured it was too soon after Blue Hawaii to do another Blue Hawaii, and by 1966 he figured again it was long enough after Blue Hawaii to do another Blue Hawaii. The Paradise Cove set is a lovely mix of Hawaiian tropics and Chinese decor, but one location can't make up for all the dull nightclubs and office interiors. The boating scenes aren't anything to write home about either, and they look as if they were concentrating mostly on simply not falling off the boat. The camera bobs and shakes dramatically with the waves, which is why for key scenes we get everything acted out on a set with rear projection of the ocean. Rear projection is just something you expect from an older film, especially when someone is driving or water skiing.

Girls! Girls! Girls! is light and inoffensive fair, save of course for a few ill-advised moments involving those Chinese kids. There's no brilliant movie here, that's for sure, but while it may lack the qualities that make a film impressive, Girls! Girls! Girls! is still pretty entertaining. Elvis looks good, the story is okay, and everything is pretty breezy and fun despite the film's flaws. Even if Elvis harbored dreams of becoming a real actor, everyone else involved with the film never attempted to make anything other than a goofball musical comedy. So that's exactly what you get here. There are better examples of the genre, but there are also examples that are a whole lot worse. That may not sound like much of a ringing endorsement, but if you're looking for nothing more than silly fun in the sun, this movie will deliver. Additional points are added for its attempts to combat Asian stereotypes, but then they lose those points again for indulging in musical numbers that pander to those same stereotypes. Big points get awarded for the finale, Elvis Presley's Cavalcade of Girls, which sees Elvis return to Paradise Cove for a show-closing musical number in which girls from all over the world, wearing everything from hula skirts to Capri pants to slinky cheongsams come out to go-go dance with The King.

And if that isn't enough, Elvis sings in Chinese and sings that ballad about the brave little shrimp.

It would be some time before they'd send Elvis to the Hawaiian well for a third time, and by then it was more of a desperation move to revitalize interest in the films.

Labels: Beach Party Tonight, Musicals, Stars: Elvis, Year: 1962