Live a Little, Love a Little

Live a Little, Love a Little
October 23, 1968
MGM
Comedy, Romance, Musical
VHS
B-

Although directed by Taurog, this is not a typical Elvis movie.  It's based on the book Kiss My Firm But Pliant Lips, which I've read but no longer own.  (And, yes, that would've been a more typical late '60s movie title than LaL, LaL, but it wouldn't sound like an Elvis movie.)  From what I recall, the wackiness of the book is actually toned down for the movie, but you still have Michele Carey, who was Michele in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, as Bernice/Betty/Susie/Alice Baby, the ex-wife of Dick Sargent, chasing after Elvis-- to the point of making him lose his job and apartment and then renting him a house, and that's just for starters!-- which of course makes Elvis fall in love with her.  (It was the age of the "adorable kooky girl," so I don't think she's meant to be as annoying or felonious as she comes across now.)  Meanwhile, Elvis finds not one but two full-time jobs as a photographer, one at an ad agency, the other at a girlie magazine.  Mrs. Baby has a great dane played by Elvis's dog Brutus, except in the dream sequence where there's a man in a dog costume.  Oh, and Elvis sings "A Little Less Conversation," which became a huge hit about 35 years later, remixed by Junkie XL.

Thirty-five years earlier, International House featured two of the performers in this movie, Sterling Holloway and Rudy Vallee, who in Live a Little play a milkman and one of Elvis's bosses respectively.  And, yes, that's Gidget's most famous dad, Don Porter, as Elvis's other boss, the one at Classic Cat magazine.  Not surprisingly, two of the models, Veronica Ericson and Heidi Winston, were in girlie-magazine-centered The Swinger.  Another model, Brooke Mills, would be Mrs. Gibbons in Freaky Friday.

That's Joan Shawlee, best known as Some Like It Hot's Sweet Sue, as the new tenant in Elvis's apartment.  Larry Billman was a dancer in Beach Ball as well as here.  Thordis Brandt was in Spinout, Hal Riddle in Speedway.  Phyllis Davis, who plays the 2nd secretary, was in Spinout and The Swinger.

This time Elvis's buddy Red West plays a newspaper vendor, while his friend Joe Esposito plays one of the workmen at the newspaper that Elvis gets fired from.  And this time Myrna Ross, formerly one of Von Zipper's Mice, plays a "female companion" (I don't know whose).  Paul Sorensen would do some '70s Disney movies.

The Edge of Reality

International House

International House
May 27, 1933
Paramount
Comedy, Musical
DVD
B-

Uneven sort-of-parody of Grand Hotel (1932), this has a large cast gathering in Wu-Hu, China, a town so named only so that it can constantly be punned on in dialogue and sound effects.  (I think Paramount recycled this sound in Duck Soup.)  At one point, the "sissy" hotel manager played by Franklin Pangborn yells "Wu-Hu!" at W. C. Fields, who says, "Don't let the posy [in his boutonniere] fool you."  This is a very Pre-Code movie, with Fields's lines in particular impossible to imagine a year or two later.  "Nuts" was specifically mentioned in the Code, yet Fields repeats it at least a half dozen times, meaning "nuts and bolts," and even if "pussy" wasn't officially banned, he refers to a cat as such with great relish.  Peggy Hopkins Joyce (as her then infamous millionaire-marrying self) sits on the cat but doesn't know what she's sitting on.  When she tells Fields she's sitting on something, he replies, "I lost mine in the Stock Market."

And earlier, Gracie Allen sits on a stethoscope and listens to her "heartbeat."  She and George Burns are probably the best thing about this movie, even if they are doing old vaudeville routines, like the one about her father bringing home the wrong baby carriage.  The movie also has Cab Calloway singing "Reefer Man"!  And a bluesy Baby Rose Marie belting one out.  (She was then 9 and is still alive at 90.  Yes, Dick Van Dyke's Rose Marie.)  And Rudy Vallee singing a love song to his megaphone.  And Sterling Holloway dancing.  And Bela Lugosi, a couple years after Dracula, as Joyce's ex-husband.  Plus many people you've never heard of, although I'm tagging Edmund Breese, who plays Dr. Wong, the inventor of a "television device," because he has a small role in Duck Soup.

While I wouldn't describe the movie as non-racist, it is for its time refreshingly not-very-racist, with the Chinese actually coming off better than the Americans and Europeans.  I think the setting was only chosen to lead to that "Wu-Hu" pun.  And, yes, the movie is of scientific interest, with not only a television that can transmit from anywhere in the world, but also Fields's autogyro.

I'm not a big Fields fan, although I do like how he wreaks more havoc in this hotel in his first five minutes than Harpo and Chico did in an hour of The Cocoanuts.  I ended up buying a very cheap DVD package of ten Fields movies, just so I could own this oddity of a film.  So, although in general I'm going to be blogging about movies I've seen at least a few times, I won't swear to it that I'll have seen all of the other nine Fields films before.  But I do own them, so why not blog?