Viva Las Vegas is great fun to watch, and the chemistry between Elvis and Ann is fantastic. I read somewhere that the Colonel wasn’t happy that Ann matched Elvis on screen, as he was supposed to be the star and she the co-star. Not too much of a plot, but just fun to watch.
I can't really add much more to what has already been said about Viva Las Vegas. Elvis and Ann Margaret were a great match. I agree about the ending being rushed - they could have heightened the tension in the car race just by saying things like "they are on the final straight now" etc. This is the shortest Elvis movie we have looked at so far so there was no reason for the rushed ending.
I saw this on Wiki, something I never noticed: The scene where Presley sings "Viva Las Vegas" is performed in one single unedited shot; the only known example of such a technique in Presley's film career.
Strangely, they say that she appeared as a dancer in 7 Elvis films, but then only show songs from three films!
My guess is those are the ones where she is easily identifiable on screen(ie: not in a group or crowd). I think it just stated a fact and showed some examples.
No, Elvis wore a wig for the role of Jody in Kissin' Cousins. It's true that he dyed his hair black and his natural hair color was closer to Jody's, but he certainly didn't have time to let his hair go natural before filming KC. And what sense would it make to dye his hair blonde? Then he'd have to wear a black wig for his scenes as Josh. Looking at footage, it's clear Jody's hair is the wig and Josh's hair is the real thing. And a couple of those wigs were (apparently) sold at auction back in 2010. I say "apparently" because the box they were in is dated 1966, but there's no other movie where Elvis appeared with blonde hair like this, so these clearly are the Kissin' Cousins wigs.
They could do it, but it would entail a certain shooting schedule and now that I think about it KC was on a cheap budget.
You assume correctly. They were Bill's final Elvis studio sessions, in fact (though he came back and engineered/recorded live shows for Elvis in the 70s).
Bizarre indeed. If any decent, normal manager had been in charge, we would have had a legit soundtrack album with all the film's songs, both Elvis' and Ann-Margret's and the one duet. Ann-Margret was even signed to RCA at the time, so there would have been no issues whatsoever with releasing it. What's stranger still though is that with Colonel's paranoia about letting Elvis share the spotlight, they could have omitted the Ann-Margret songs and issued an Elvis-only soundtrack. But they didn't even do this. The unwritten rule was that if a film had six or less songs it got an EP, while films with seven or more songs got a soundtrack LP. Viva Las Vegas and Tickle Me were the only instances in which they deviated from that rule, and in the case of Tickle Me it was because the songs were all previously released. But there's no reason why they did so with VLV, and it's an especially perverse decision because the material was better than average and the film was one of his more successful ones. Talk about leaving money on the table.
Agreed. The one criticism I have is the extremely abrupt ending. When I first saw it, I felt like I was watching something that had been butchered by bad editing, with the jump cut from the race's end to them leaving the chapel. I was not surprised to find out later that they had filmed a full-on wedding scene inside the chapel which ended up on the cutting room floor. I don't know this for a fact, but I like to speculate that the lost wedding scene included them singing "You're the Boss" to each other as their wedding vows. That would have been really cool. I wonder why they felt the need to hack the film down like that? It's certainly not overlong and would not be even with five or ten minutes added for the wedding scene. In fact, at 85 minutes it's his shortest dramatic film (tied with Harum Scarum).
Was this just recently? I ask because I was in Dollar Tree the other day, and they had a ton of DVDs, but being short on time, I didn't flip thru them... If you found your copy just recently, I would guess that maybe a few copies got into the batch shipped to the Dollar Tree I was at too...
Last week. No other titles by Elvis. Mostly MGM films. 2021 manufactured. Dollar Tree has great $1 titles but you have to be there when they put them out.....like box cutters. They put out stinkers a lot. One Denzel Washington film where he played a Brit was horrible.
