After the Pearl Harbor concert, Elvis remained in Hawaii at the Hilton Village during location filming for “Blue Hawaii”, which continued for three weeks, before the cast and crew returned to Hollywood to complete the remaining scenes. Location filming took place at Waikiki Beach, Diamond Head, Mount Tantalus, Hanauma Bay and the Coco Palms Resort.
“Blue Hawaii” was the first of three movies Elvis shot in Hawaii, the others being “Girls! Girls! Girls!” in 1962 and “Paradise Hawaiian Style” in 1965. Elvis’s love of the islands would mean he took holidays there, including in 1968, ahead of the TV Special, when he visited the memorial with Priscilla, and for his last ever holiday in March 1977. He also performed the first live, satellite broadcast, television special, “Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii” in 1973. Elvis certainly helped put Hawaii on the tourist map.
“Blue Hawaii”, along with “Viva Las Vegas”, were Elvis’ two most successful movies. If you take the soundtrack into account, “Blue Hawaii” comes out on top, as “Viva Las Vegas” was one of the few of his 1960’s movies that did not have a full soundtrack album release. Instead, the songs were released on an EP format. The “Blue Hawaii” soundtrack spent 20 weeks at number 1 in the US, was nominated for the “Best Soundtrack” Grammy, and, in the UK, spent 18 weeks at number 1. The movie also yielded the UK number 1 and US number 2 single “Can’t Help Falling in Love”.
Hal Wallis used a portion of the movie’s profits to finance the production of the 1964 film “Becket,” starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, an historical drama about Henry II of England and Thomas Becket. This would not be the only time producers used profits from Elvis movies to fund more serious works. It did not escape Elvis that this was happening whilst he remained ensconced in romantic, musical comedies, and as the 1960’s went by and the production quality of the films dropped, Elvis would become increasingly unhappy with Hollywood to the point it would make him ill.
The same thing happened with the music, too. When the soundtracks to “G. I. Blues” and “Blue Hawaii” outsold regular albums “Elvis is Back!” and “Something for Everybody”, the Colonel, backed by RCA, decided there was no point in competing with your own records by releasing both soundtrack and non-soundtrack albums. The money men wanted Elvis simply to repeat the same formula again and again. As the years wore on and the levels of success dropped off, Elvis became increasingly annoyed. If “G. I. Blues” started the pattern, it was “Blue Hawaii” that cemented it.
For its genre, “Blue Hawaii” was a good film. Elvis plays Chad Gates, the son of well-to-do parents who returns home after two years in the army. He is expected to collaborate with his father, who is the Vice President of “The Great Hawaiian Fruit Company”. But Chad does not want to take a ready-made path. This particularly upsets his mother, Sarah Lee (played by Angela Lansbury), who is very snobbish, which is the source of much of the comedy. Chad gets a job as a tourist guide working for the same company as his girlfriend, Maile (played by Joan Blackman). His first job is to escort a schoolteacher and three college girls around the islands during the summer holiday period. One of the girls, Ellie (played by Jenny Maxwell), is troubled and frequently tries to disrupt proceedings and seeks Chad’s attention. This leads to conflict within the group and between Chad and Maile. It comes to a head when Ellie takes a pink jeep from the Coco Palms Resort and ends up in an accident. Chad finds her and the two of them have a heated exchange of life opinions before Chad administers an “old-fashioned” spanking to the spoiled but lonely teenager. This does the trick, and everything works out in the end with Chad and Maile getting married.
