Pages

Saturday, November 26, 2011

No Christmas From Elvis In Hollywood

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent, but I cheated and started celebrating the Christmas season today, listening to my favorite Elvis Christmas compilation album If Every Day Was Like Christmas. Elvis' Christmas songs play an important role in helping me get in the "Christmas mode," and while listening to them it struck me that the same certainly can't be said about his movies.

Come to think about it, isn't it a bit strange that no Elvis movie ever took place around Christmas? After all, a lot of pictures do. But in the case of Elvis, sand was a lot more common property than snow.

At the top of my head, I can only recall two Elvis films where it's snowing, and in one of them the snow isn't even the real thing. In Live A Little, Love A Little, Elvis charachter and fashion photographer Greg Nolan has a busy time working two full-time jobs for separate magazines.


One of them is called Classic Cat Magazine, and in one scene Elvis is shooting studio photos of a lightly dressed model standing on a stump in a landscape covered in snow. Fake snowflakes are whirling around the model, thanks to a giant fan. (When Elvis orders the model's skirt raised, the guy handling the fan gets a little too excited and unintentionally sets it at full blast, leading to the destruction of the whole set.)

In Girl Happy, made four years earlier, real snow is falling down in Chicago. Rusty Wells (aka Elvis Presley) and his combo is playing at the nightclub 77 Club, and the snow is clearly visible outside the big windows as they perform the title track at the beginning of the movie.


Not that it's Christmas, though. No, it's Easter, and Elvis will soon have changed the snow for–yes, you guessed it–sand, and sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There he and his three band members have to secretly chaperon the daughter of their employer, the nightclub's owner. About as far from a Christmas story as it gets.

No, if you want to get in the Christmas spirit with the help of Elvis, you'd better stick to his Christmas recordings. And while you're at it, why don't you try out Christmas Dreams 2011: An Elvis Playlist for the Holiday Season, by Troy Y. over at his The Mystery Train Blog.

No comments: