1966, United States. Starring Elvis Presley, Suzanna Leigh, James Shigeta, Donna Butterworth, Marianna Hill, Irene Tsu, Linda Wong, Julie Parrish, Jan Shepard, John Doucette, Philip Ahn, Mary Treen. Directed by Michael Moore.

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. By the mid-1960s, people weren't being as kind to Elvis' films as they were in the beginning. Sure, they were still popular with the kids, but critics lost their patience somewhere around Harum Scarum and had to admit to themselves that Elvis had yet to become the next James Dean, and it was very likely that he wasn't going to be doing it any time soon. James Dean, after all, died before he could make a movie like Kissin' Cousins. Although Elvis movies made money, each subsequent film seemed to get saddled with a smaller and smaller budget. Producers figured that if people were going to see them anyway, why waste money on big budgets when you keep things inexpensive and reap even bigger profits off Elvis singing about shrimp and papayas. By the end of things, Elvis movies and Battle for the Planet of the Apes were no doubt sitting together in threadbare recliners wondering what went wrong.

The decline in the quality of Elvis movies - if you can believe they could decline in the first place - was matched with a general decline in the popularity of The King. See, there was this ragged bunch of mop tops who blew across the Atlantic and took music by storm, becoming the only musical act that could go toe to toe with Elvis' classic popularity. When The Beatles broke, the King of Rock 'n' Roll must have felt a little like the King of England looking at a Parliament that now held most of the power.

And while The Beatles turned in ground-breaking, often puzzling samples of cinema that were big on experimentation and the avant garde, the people behind Elvis decided it was time for more of the same old, same old. A Hard Day's Night came out in 1964, and Magical Mystery Tour hit theaters in 1967, leaving Presley's return to the beach for one more go-round sandwiched in between what most everyone considers two of the most influential and ground-breaking music-related movies ever made and leaving Presley himself looking outdated and, well, corny. The Beatles were aided by more caring and careful keepers who obviously learned lessons from the Elvis films. They weren't going to let their boys loose their edge by becoming something that parents could embrace instead of fear. The Mop Top movies employed avant garde narrative structure and direction, keeping them edgy and bizarre where Elvis films were content to tread well-worn teenie-bopper waters. Ironically, years later The Monkees would sink their careers when they attemped cinematic surrealism a la Beatles films when, really, all anyone wanted from them was a light Elvis-style comedy.

Paradise, Hawaiian Style was producer Hal Wallis' attempt to capture lightning in a bottle for a third time. Elvis first romp around the islands of Hawaii was a huge success, the most successful Elvis movie of all time, as a matter of fact, and a thoroughly enjoyable film. His second Polynesian adventure was the more modest Girls! Girls! Girls!, which confined itself primarily to nightclub sets and hum-drum docks with only a few flirtations with the beauty of the islands. Although it wasn't exactly a pretty film, it was different enough from Blue Hawaii to remain interesting. By 1966, however, everyone figured it was time to trot the Blue Hawaii suit out again, but with a smaller budget, stupider jokes, and awful songs.

The lack of appeal in the island photography -- we'd seen it all before and better executed in Blue Hawaii -- isn't half as shocking as the lack of appeal of Elvis photography. The never-ending fluff of his films had finally started taking its toll, and the Elvis we see here is most definitely not the fine looking specimen we saw back in Blue Hawaii. This Elvis is about twenty pounds overweight, with much of it being in his face. His hair is awful. In many of his scenes he has a glazed look in his eyes that says he's just as disappointed with the movie as you are. The Elvis that drove everyone wild, the Elvis that revolutionized the world and became one of the biggest icons in history, is here reduced to making bug eyes at a bunch of wacky dogs and singing about papayas to a precocious little girl. The better Elvis movies were always bubblegum, but they allowed some of Elvis charm, appeal, and energy to shine through despite the lightweight material. With Paradise, Hawaiian Style, the decline is painful because there's so little Elvis in what Elvis is doing.

The tell-tale sign of Elvis' physical decline comes in comparing bare-chested bathing suit shots. In Blue Hawaii, Elvis can hardly keep his shirt on. We frequently see him cavorting about in the waves sans shirt, sunning himself on a surfboard, whatever it takes. When Elvis puts a shirt on, it's usually a sharp "aloha" deal. And he's always wearing those tiny little swimming trunks that were so popular back then and should not be worn by most men since most men do not look like Elvis or Burt Lancaster. Heck, most men don't even look like Frankie Avalon. Most men look more like Joe Don Baker, and cool as he may be, the world has never demanded Joe don skimpier swimwear.

Paradise, Hawaiian Style knew better than to show what happened to Elvis. If his face is as fat as we see, then one can only shudder at what his out of control Southern boy diet had done to his waistline. We see Elvis without his shirt one time, and when it happens it looks like he's wearing swimwear with a built-in girdle. It only lasts a second too, and rather than linger on the King's form, they have him rush in and wrap himself in a towel while he puts on clothes. I'm not saying that to have a good Elvis movie you have to have the guy shirtless every ten minutes. But if you're going to make a movie set on the beaches of Hawaii, you should make sure your leading man can take his shirt off without evoking a reaction like, "I'd just as soon see a shirtless Gary Busey."

I should also mention that Elvis' hair is doing something really weird and disagreeable. Sensing perhaps the defeated spirit of its owner, the King's trademark pompadour is looking particularly floppy and disheveled, like Free Willy's dorsal fin.

Regardless, and even when he's looking out of shape and bored as he does here, he still oozes Elvis charm and appeal, and that's more than enough to carry him. Bad as the material may be, your stern criticism of a movie like this melts every time the King flashes his trademark smirk. It's just an example amid all the fluff of just how powerful Elvis was, even when he wasn't trying.

Though he may not have his previous character's fashion sense or physical fitness, Elvis still plays the same guy as always. As difficult as it is to believe, Elvis plays Rick Richards, a decent guy just looking to make it on his own. This time out, he's an airline pilot freshly fired for an incident in which he did the right thing and was wrongly punished. After returning to Hawaii, he hatches a plot to open a helicopter tour company with his pal, Danny Kohana (James Shigeta). This is a lot different than the plot of Blue Hawaii, in which he returns to Hawaii and looks to start his own island tour company that is based entirely on the ground instead of in helicopters. Helping the boys out is the lovely Friday (Suzanna Leigh), whom Danny has said is married so Elvis won't ignore his duties in favor of tomcattin' about with the secretary. Much ado is made about the fact that Friday is actually an ace pilot and mechanic herself but still relegated to "women's work," but just as the movie comes up with something interesting if not terribly original, it fumbles about and never really goes anywhere with it.

Filling out the cast is Danny's adorable daughter, Jan. By adorable, of course, I mean adorable in that same way stepping on a sea urchin is adorable. In the history of annoying child stars being crammed down our throats by a movie, she's nowhere near the worst of the bunch, but her loud kid singing really got on my nerves. Young actress Donna Butterworth actually does a fairly good job of playing the character, but the inclusion of a cute kid and a helicopter full of funny dogs really signals just how low this film will sink. Cute kids in movies just irritate me, even if they're not awful performers. So apologies to Donna. You're not a bad actress, and you're among the most tolerable of cute kids in movies that don't need cute kids. But those things still annoy me.

Complications arise when Elvis agrees to chopper a load of dogs to a kennel club show for some snooty lady. I'm sure scriptwriters Anthony Lawrence and Allan Weiss thought it would be really funny to stick the guy who sang "Hound Dog" into a helicopter with a bunch of dogs, then have him sing to them and hurl doggie biscuits around. And maybe it is kind of funny in an obvious sort of way for a little while. But then the scene keeps going. And it keeps going. And before too long we start to wonder if the entire film is going to be comprised of nothing but lovely scenery shots intercut with shots of a pudgy-faced Elvis yelling, "You pooches settle down!" Eventually, the cockpit shenanigans cause Elvis to loose control of his whirlybird and force a car off the highway - a car which just happens to belong to the local FAA commissioner. Elvis is grounded until his friend Danny has a wreck and needs rescuing. Will Elvis break the rules, save his friend, and then give an impassioned speech about how he values friendship more than his pilot's license, thus convincing the FAA to only give him a warning? Will he get in a fight where he's forced to use some judo? Only time and Paradise, Hawaiian Style will tell.

There's a lot wrong with this movie. But since I'm a generally positive guy and can't, in the end, say that I didn't find Paradise, Hawaiian Style to be enjoyable despite itself, I'll begin instead with what the film does right. First of all, the island scenery is lovely as always, though not as lovely as it was in the better photographed Blue Hawaii. That film simply seemed to have more vivid color and director Norman Taurog showcased a better eye for sweeping cinematography there than Michael Moore does this time out. Still, Hawaii is a gorgeous island, and you'd have to work pretty hard not to go up in a helicopter and come down with some sumptuous shots. The fact that Elvis is a helicopter pilot even gives the film added incentive to fly about photographing lush tropical jungles, beaches, and lagoons.

The supporting cast is by no means an assembly of big names, but very few of them are bad performers. Co-star James Shigeta is probably best known as the Japanese businessman who gets executed by that evil Hans in Die Hard. He was also in Flower Drum Song, since there's apparently a law that all Asians in an Elvis film must have had at least something to do with Flower Drum Song. More recently, he did voicework on Disney's Mulan and had a part in Takeshi Kitano's cross-over film Brother. His character, like the Asian family in Girls! Girls! Girls! is another attempt by an Elvis movie to portray Asians not as exotic others, but as regular folks just like us. It's a much better effort this time around, as Danny is never presented to us as anything other than a pilot and father. At no point does he walk onto screen accompanied by the crashing of a gong, the whisper of flute music, or that snippet of "oriental" music they usually play. At no point does he refer to anyone as "honorable so-and-so," refer to his ancestors, or do martial arts (them's for Elvis to do). He's just a regular guy with a rich speaking voice.

Inevitable love interest Suzanna Leigh is also not bad in her role as the frustrated female pilot forced by society to do bookkeeping and answer the phones. She had herself quite a career in horror and scifi films, including roles in The Deadly Bees, Lost Continent, Lust for a Vampire, and one of my favorite European caper films, Deadlier than the Male. Her character has about as much to do as any female character in an Elvis movie, which means she's just a place holder up until the point Elvis finally grabs her and gives her a kiss. The other woman in Elvis' life is Marianna Hill, who plays his on-again, off-again girlfriend Lani Kaimana. Elvis always has two women in his life. His destiny, and the girl he's with who may not be terrible, but certainly has some irksome character traits. Marianna fulfills that role pretty well. She also had a small uncredited role in a previous Elvis film, Roustabout, which also had small roles for Teri Garr and Raquel Welch.

The quick-eyed will also catch a glimpe of Irene Tsu, who went on to star in cult faves such as Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Karate Killers, the Doris Day spy spoof Caprice, the goofball John Wayne Vietnam war flick The Green Berets, and more respectably the highly acclaimed Hong Kong romance Comrades, Almost a Love Story starring Maggie Cheung.

If you're gonna watch an Elvis movie, you better enjoy listening to Elvis sing since he'll do a lot of it. Paradise, Hawaiian Style rarely takes a break from the musical festivities. This is another one of those movies where we sometimes get one musical number immediately followed by another musical number without any dialogue in between. This wouldn't be so bad if the songs here were as good as the songs in Blue Hawaii, but like all aspects of the film, even Elvis' singing, -- designed to recall the smooth Elvis exotica of Blue Hawaii -- only serves to remind us how much better that film was than this one. At the very least, we can at least hope for one good song. Girls! Girls! Girls! has "Return to Sender."

No such luck here. The songs range from forgettable duds to embarrassing dogs - especially the one he sings to the dogs. That one was strictly for the dogs. "Queenie Wahine's Papayas" doesn't make things any better. One could almost convince oneself that Elvis is singing a thinly veiled song about breasts, which almost makes the song bearable. But then, one has to remember a couple things. First, he's singing the song to a ten year old girl, which makes thinking of it as a subversive ode to those wonderful parts of the female anatomy rather creepy. Second, I don't know about you, but I can't say as I'd find papaya-shaped breasts to be especially titillating. I guess as far as "tropical fruit as boobs" goes, a papaya at least beats a pineapple, though I'm sure there's at least one webpage out there dedicated to women whose breasts are covered in rough spines and sprout rigid leaves from the nipples.

Ultimately, we're just going to have to chalk up "Queenie Wahine's Papayas" as one of those songs that goes well with "Song of the Shrimp" and that song from Clambake! about how they're all gonna bake some clams. What was it with people making Elvis sing about food? That's for Weird Al Yankovich and Shonen Knife.

Director Michael Moore (no, not that Michael Moore) does a suitable job, though the film is definitely worse for the lack of Norman Taurog's involvement. Moore doesn't have the taste he does, and the resulting film seems a tad grubbier. Moore was an accomplished second unit director, which is one of the many great uncelebrated responsibilities in making a film. Second unit directors do a ton of work (in some cases shooting even more of a film than the director) and rarely get any recognition. Moore started his career as an assistant director on the apocalyptic sci-fi classic When Worlds Collide, worked as the same on the epic Ten Commandments, and then served as assistant director on five Elvis movies: King Creole, Blue Hawaii, Girls! Girls! Girls!, Roustabout, and Fun in Acapulco. Those were all pretty good films as far as Elvis fare goes, and with Taurog (who was directing another Elvis movie, Spinout, that same year) not involved with Paradise, Hawaiian Style, Moore was a natural choice to replace him. He does the best he can with the limited budget and an uninterested star. The experience seems to have soured him on being the lead director, because after a few more films, he went back to a long and successful career as an assistant director and second unit man, including work on Patton, Rooster Cogburn, the Indiana Jones trilogy, and Never Say Never Again.

In fact, Paradise, Hawaiian Style was very much a second unit film. Not only was Moore a second unit director bumped up to head honcho duties, but cinematographer W. Wallace Kelley was the second unit photographer for Blue Hawaii under Charles Lang Jr. Lang went from Blue Hawaii to doing cinematography for films like How the West was Won and How to Marry a Millionaire (which came out the same year as Paradise, Hawaiian Style). Kelley, on the other hand, continued to work with Michael Moore on a number of Moore's directorial efforts throughout the 1960s but never really worked on anything held in high regard. His short-comings as a full-fledged cinematographer account for a portion of the film's failure to match Blue Hawaii in terms of beauty, though Paradise, Hawaiian Style still has some shining moments -- how can you not when your star is the Hawaiian Islands? But not all the blame can fall on Kelley, just as not all of it can fall on Moore. When you're short-changed in the budget department, technical aspects of the film are the first to have their corners cut. Paradise, Hawaiian Style's cheaper look has less to do with it relying on second unit guys and more to do with the fact that, well, it was cheaper. You can't have Blue Hawaii again if you're not willing to pay for it.

As with most Elvis films, nothing here is very good, but everything here -- acting, direction, cinematography, and so forth -- is fairly entertaining, inoffensive, and fun. Elvis movies were never meant to be much more than Saturday matinee or drive-in fun for the family, and if that's all you want, then even a film from the lower end of the Elvis bell curve proves enjoyable. Since that was all I was looking for, I did indeed have a ball watching Paradise, Hawaiian Style. It's easy to harp on all the negatives in a film like this, but somewhere amid all the sniping I also realize that I'm actually having fun watching the movie, more than I am making cracks about it. Say what you will about what that says about my taste. Paradise, Hawaiian Style isn't good, but it's better than you might think.

Paradise, Hawaiian Style strives for most of its running time to be Return to Blue Hawaii. It never succeeds, but like a scrappy little brother who discovers the one thing he can do better than his older, more talented brother the film does manage to do one thing better than Blue Hawaii, and that's throw a finale. Blue Hawaii ends with Elvis' lavish and respectable Hawaiian wedding. Paradise, Hawaiian Style, on the other hand, ends with a completely gratuitous tour of fire twirlers, hula dancers, waterfalls, and all sorts of "Polynesia, Martin Denny Style" type of celebration. It comes out of nowhere and has no logical explanation, but as with all problems in this film, who really cares? Anything that leaves me with a shot of Elvis singing his heart out surrounded by an army of hula girls with palm trees and South Seas beauty in the background makes up for any missteps we may have endured along the way.

Labels: Beach Party Tonight, Musicals, Stars: Elvis, Year: 1966