Blue Hawaii (1961)

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General		Extras
Category	Romantic Comedy	Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1961
Running Time	96:57
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Programme
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Norman Taurog
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Elvis Presley Joan Blackman Angela Lansbury
Case	?
RPI	$39.95	Music	Joseph J. Lilley

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (224Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (224Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (224Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (224Kb/s) English Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English French German Italian Spanish English for the Hearing Impaired Arabic Bulgarian Croatian Czech Danish Finnish Greek Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Dutch Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Slovenian Swedish Turkish	Smoking	Yes, 17 year old girl among others.
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Blue Hawaii is, by a small margin, more than just a vehicle for a series of famous Elvis songs. Though we do barely go ten minutes without a cue for a song, there is still a reasonable underlying storyline. Made in 1961, Elvis is not half the man that he would later be...in fact probably about a third if measured on an accurate set of scales. Here we see him as the true heart throb that used to send women wild and make men jealous.

    The scenery for this film is supplied by Hawaii. The beaches (without a rideable wave in sight) and the volcanoes make a wonderful backdrop, presented in all their 2.35:1 glory. Everything is here from that era; the cars, the music.. and the girls. It is fun to see glamour completely override continuity when our leading lady is dunked in the ocean and then only seconds later reappears in a bikini with her hair dry and nicely restyled. Each time she appears it is in a different outfit, and all of them are very attractive.

    Angela Lansbury plays a character that is far distanced from her later roles. In this film, she plays Elvis' mother who is a very dizzy Southern belle. They do harp on the Hawaii setting a fair amount, and we see a tourist's view of the islands and their people.

    In this film, Elvis is in uniform again, but only for a short time. He has been away from Hawaii for two years. It would seem that he joined the army in the first place to get away from his parents, who want him to follow in his father's footsteps. His father runs a large pineapple plantation. He returns and hooks up with his old girlfriend, Maile Duval (Joan Blackman) and attempts to hide his return from his parents. This only lasts a few days and soon he is back under pressure to join the family company. In an attempt to be more independent, he joins the travel agency that Maile works for as a tourist guide. His first assignment is to guide a school teacher and her three students around the island. The school teacher turns out to be very attractive, and Maile is instantly on her guard. From here there are a couple of threads to the story; Maile's belief that Chad (Elvis' character) is falling for the school teacher, problems with one of the young students, and Chad's parents ongoing attempts to make Chad toe the line. His mother is also not entirely enamoured with Maile as she believes she is not from the right family. In between the songs, the threads all come together for a happy ending.

Video

    The film is presented at at aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and is 16x9 enhanced.

    There are several degrees of sharpness in this transfer, unfortunately none of them great. The best sharpness is in the foreground of any studio shot. The worst sharpness is in the same scenes in the projected screen backgrounds. In between sharpness-wise are the location shots. Black levels and shadow detail are surprisingly good and there is only a small amount of background noise. There are some occasions where the brightness of the picture fluctuates for a moment but this is only a minor distraction.

    The colours are the wonderful, almost oversaturated result of the Technicolor process. They match the age and feel of the film very well and are free of chroma noise.

     There are only some minor MPEG artefacts. There is some edge enhancement, such as on the tree trunks at 8:58 and some posterization in some of the skin tones, an example being visible at 10:09 on the face. There is a constant stream of film artefacts, dirt, scratches and flecks. It is a shame they could not have found a better film master. At 71:30 there are some reel change marks indicating this transfer is from a release print. The reel change marks had me confused for a moment as they do not appear on the screen as round, rather as ovals. This of course is a result of the Cinemascope process - on the original negative they would have been round while everything else was vertically stretched. There is a moderate amount of grain present.

    There are a very large number of subtitles on this disc, including two English subtitle streams; standard English subtitles and English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles. The Hearing Impaired subtitles include the words to the songs while the standard ones do not. So if you don't know the words and want to sing along, you want the second set.

    This is a single layered disc.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is a single Dolby Digital 5.1 sound track in English on this disc. Also present are French, German, Italian and Spanish soundtracks in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono along with the very welcome inclusion of the original soundtrack restored and presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono. I listened to the Dolby Digital 5.1 in its entirety and sampled the restored mono soundtrack. The 5.1 track only really spreads the soundstage around the room - there are no real surround effects or really any actual stereo image. Apart from this, I found the voices a little more prominent in the 5.1 mix as compared to the mono soundtrack.

    Dialogue quality is excellent throughout the film.

    Audio sync varies a little but this is not a problem with the disc. The external scenes are very obviously looped in later and sometimes are more than a little out. Two of the worst scenes are at 1:06 at the airport and a little later on the beach. Studio work and the singing is pretty much spot on.

    The music is wonderful. Even though I am not an official fan of Elvis, the songs in this film are very good, in particular Falling In Love With You. In between the songs, there is some fairly standard fare with a predominantly Hawaiian theme.

    The surrounds carried a copy of the front channels and the subwoofer did not really have much to do

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    Place the disc in your player and the movie begins to play straight away. At the end of the film, we return to a static menu with no sound.

Theatrical Trailer (3:03)

    Very much in the style of the times, an overview of the film is presented with a voiceover telling you how much you are going to enjoy yourself. Presented at 2.35:1 and 16x9 enhanced, this is accompanied by a Dolby Digital 2.0 mono soundtrack.

    The discs in both Regions appear identical as far as picture, sound and extras are concerned. R1 reviews mention a problem with MPEG artefacts and shimmering that I did not see in our transfer. The nod goes to R4 for availability if for no other reason.

.

    With more depth than I expected, this is an enjoyable film for its genre. The film harks back to an interesting time in history and it is interesting to see how values change, particularly where they depict a 17 year old girl lighting up a cigarette.

    The video is only just passable.

    The audio is very good for its age.

    The trailer and the restored mono soundtrack are our only extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall