'Girls, Girls, Girls' was the 11th movie for Elvis. It was originally to be set in New Orleans but moved back to Hawaii after the success of Elvis' 8th movie 'Blue Hawaii'. New orleans is still mentioned in the album track 'Song Of The Shrimp'.
The film bears the distinction of having the most tracks recorded for a Elvis movie. Thirteen songs appeared on the soundtrack album. Two of those were cut from the movie namely 'Where Do You Come From' and 'I Don't Want To'. Sadly The 'I Don't Want To' number written by Janice Tarre and Fred Spielman appeared in the movie trailer only. It was the only song of theirs that Elvis ever recorded. Four other songs recorded were 'Mama', 'Plantation Rock', 'Dainty Little Moonbeams' and 'Girls, Girls, Girls' (end title version). There were also three songs performed by Gilda Maiken (a member of the vocal group The Skylarks) who dubbed Stella Stevens voice on 'Baby, Baby, Baby', 'The Nearness Of You' and 'Never Let Me Go'.
The album did very well in the USA peaking at position #3 and spending 32 weeks on the Billboard chart. In the UK number #2 was it's highest position where it stayed for six straight weeks. The album that kept it off the top spot was 'Summer Holiday' by Cliff Richard. It would be Cliff's last chart topper till 1977 and his '40 Golden Greats' album.
January 1963 UK Mono LP:-
'Return To Sender' / 'Where Do You Come From' would be the single releasd from the soundtrack. It would peak at Number #1 in the UK where it stayed for three weeks over Christmas 1962. The USA chart place would be position #2 with the Four Seasons 'Big Girls Don't Cry' taking the top spot.
one of my favorite movies.
love the soundtrack...just a fun album.
return to sender...a crown jewel.
one of the greatest trax he ever recorded.
I think you probably like Girls! Girls! Girls! more than I do, eric, but Return to Sender is undoubtedly a highlight of the film and it's one of the most joyous musical moments in any of Elvis's movies. In my opinion, at least.
Behind Elvis, incidentally, on piano in this scene, is Jack Nitzsche. The talented musical arranger, composer, and songwriter, who co-wrote and won an Oscar for Up Where We Belong with his wife at the time, Buffy Sainte-Marie, for An Officer and a Gentleman. He was also Oscar-nominated for Best Original Score for the same film. And for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
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Nitzsche did a lot of fine work as the composer on films as diverse as Hardcore, Cruising, Mermaids, Starman, and The Jewel of the Nile. Whilst he also worked closely with the Rolling Stones, Phil Spector, and Neil Young. Amongst many other things in film and music. But he had a very unique style as a composer.
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I do like Girls! Girls! Girls! all the same, and whilst it's a film that's in need of some trimming for the sake of better pacing, the soundtrack is quite delightful. Although, for a film set in Hawaii, it doesn't have any Hawaiian identity, which, as Andy has commented, is because it was originally in development as Gumbo Ya-Ya. And would have been set in Louisiana.
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Did a change of location hurt the film?! Probably not in any significant way. There isn't much on the page, whilst there's not only a lack of chemistry between Elvis and Laurel Goodwin, their relationship doesn't ring true either. Which is hindered even further by how mechanically they both deliver lines of dialogue in their scenes together. There's no nuance. Little feeling. Just words parroted back and forth.
Elvis had more chemistry with Jeremy Slate, who is good value here. Although Stella Stevens is underused despite having a few musical moments of her own. Albeit with Gilda Maiken providing the singing voice for her character. Still, Ned Washington & Hoagy Carmichael's The Nearness of You is a stellar song!
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Stevens also took part in a Coppertone ad campaign as endorsed by Hal Wallis, which was done in conjunction with Girls! Girls! Girls!, although she also appeared in Coppertone ads that highlighted her appearances in The Nutty Professor and Band of Gold (a.k.a. How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life). However, Tom Parker interfered and had the advertisement promoting Girls! Girls! Girls! pulled because he didn't want Elvis's name used.
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The film's soundtrack was popular and successful, as Andy has also discussed. And so was the film. Which peaked at No. 6 on Variety's weekly box office chart. Ranked 31st on Variety's annual list for 1962. And ultimately made $3.6 million domestic.
Girls! Girls! Girls! did open during quite a competitive month and ultimately broke into the Variety's weekly box office top-ten the same week as Mutiny on the Bounty, which bowed at No. 3 and eventually spent four weeks at the number one position.
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However, changing this project's location from Louisiana to Hawaii, which was undoubtedly done on the heels of Blue Hawaii's success, surely made commercial sense, although this was another example of a precedent being set for the sake of adhering to formulaic movie making. Although Wallis would have been quite aware of Flaming Star and Wild in the Country's commercial fortunes. Or lack thereof.
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Dissertation in the state of bliss (Love and learn) – track UO
The song was recorded on 2 may 1962 by Gilda Maiken for lip-synch in the movie by Stella Stevens (track UTD-1).
The song was written by Ira Gershwin / music by Harold Arlen and registered at ASCAP with performer Patty Andrews.
There’s a version recorded around 1954/1955 by Bing Crosby and Patty Andrews for an album.
There’s a clip on Youtube with Bing Crosby and Jacqueline Fontaine.
colonel snow
Dissertation on the State or Bliss was recorded by Bing and Patty Andrews for the 1954 film, The Country Girl. Ira Gershwin originally titled the song "Love and Learn," although he discovered that three other songs existed with the same name. Hence the title change. This was the last song Bing recorded with any of the Andrews sisters.
The Country Girl was tremendously popular in 1955. It was the number one film in America for five weeks. Variety ranked it as the sixth highest-earning film of the year, with $6.5 million ultimately taken at the domestic box office. It was nominated for seven Oscars, including Crosby as Best Actor, and Grace Kelly as Best Actress. Grace Kelly won the Oscar, as did George Seaton, for Best Original Screenplay.
The film was also nominated at Cannes, BAFTA, Golden Globes, National Board of Review, Writer's Guild of America, and the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. With Crosby and Kelly winning at the National Board of Review. And Kelly winning the Golden Globe and at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards.
I struggle to get through this one. The pacing is all wrong, thanks to Wallis being persuaded by a test audience not to cut any more songs, and too many songs have a similar feel. My views haven't changed since I wrote the following:
Elvis’s next film was Girls! Girls! Girls! and was the first to be a rehash of the formula used in Blue Hawaii. Follow That Dream and Kid Galahad might have directly followed Blue Hawaii, but they had little in common with the earlier film. The setting of Girls! Girls! Girls! was again Hawaii, and there was again a mix of Elvis, girls and lots of songs. However, the film simply wasn’t as good. At 106 minutes, it was just too long and suffered from poor pacing – something which could have been remedied by the cutting of fifteen minutes of material. The September 1, 1962 issue of Billboard states that producer Hal Wallis had seen a preview of the film in London and that “audience reaction encouraged him to leave in more songs than he had originally planned.” The soundtrack album itself worked a little better than the plodding film. Whereas the quality of the material wasn’t as good as in Blue Hawaii, there was a nice mix of songs, including some styles that Elvis hadn’t tried before. Despite this, there are too many slow numbers, and, like the film, what felt like too much padding.
Elvis was once again in fine voice, and this shines through on the plentiful number of ballads. The problem here is not how good or bad the recordings are, but that so many songs had a similar sound. Elvis’s voice sounds beautiful on I Don’t Want To (despite a wide vibrato), although the song itself is hardly top drawer. The lyrics are trite, but the melody is pretty, and at least it’s better than some of the material recorded at the previous session for the Pot Luck album.
Somewhat better is Where Do You Come From. This would be released as the flip side to the single from the film, Return to Sender. The song is underpinned by a triplet figure from Dudley Brooks on piano, but this drops out during the rather dramatic bridge section, and therefore prevents the song from being repetitive. There is a feeling that this was an attempt on the part of the songwriters to try to replicate the success of Can’t Help Falling in Love, but the majestic feel of that classic just isn’t reproduced here, although the song is pleasant enough when taken on its own terms. Once again, Elvis uses a wide vibrato that becomes more than a little distracting at times.
The vibrato is held at bay a little more in Because of Love, but here the material is really not up to par and there are signs here that Elvis was not quite as committed as normal in this session. There are moments when he runs out of breath, especially each time the line “because, because, because of love” appears, and there are other sections where he sounds hesitant, as if he is still getting to grips with the song itself. It’s surprising that Elvis let this take pass as the master. Also noticeable is the number of takes required for each song. There were 35 takes of King of the Whole Wide World at the Kid Galahad sessions but, here, most were deemed finished after less than ten.
A Boy Like Me, A Girl Like You is a clumsy title for what is in fact a rather pretty ballad by the writing team of Tepper and Bennett, who were getting more and more of their songs recorded by Elvis with each soundtrack session. Sadly, their songs were rarely the best material, often barely passing muster. A Boy Like Me, A Girl Like You is better than most, though, most notably because of the interesting chord progression over which the melody is written. The lines “There would be this magic moment/One to last a lifetime through,” for example, provide Elvis with a genuine climax to the song that he could build his performance around.
At the other extreme of Tepper and Bennett’s writing capabilities was Earth Boy, a song with a Chinese sound that may well have been written with the best intentions, but the pidgin English that makes up the lyrics makes for rather uncomfortable listening today. From that point of view, it works better in the context of the film (the obligatory Elvis-sings-with-kids scene), although Elvis actually sings very few lines of the song, with most of it being performed by children. This is a good example of the problem with issuing soundtrack albums, however. A song that might work well in a film (even if this one is a bit tedious) doesn’t always translate well to record.
Another ballad by Tepper and Bennett was Song of the Shrimp, an allegorical tale about the dangers of the big city. Yes, it is a song about a shrimp (something of an unusual subject matter, it has to be said), but the number is rather attractive and works well. What’s more, Elvis doesn’t make a joke of it; he sings it totally straight and is in beautiful voice here. It is certainly a divisive song amongst fans, but it’s an appealing track if you can get your head around the subject matter.
The final ballads were both written for the same scene in the film. Mama is an attractive song with a Neapolitan feel to it. Running at around a minute, it was spliced with a version by The Amigos, a backing group used for the sessions, when first issued on record in 1970. We’ll Be Together is considerably more substantial, and with a Spanish favour, based in fact on a public domain Mexican folk song called Carmen Carmela. The source song had been recorded a number of times during the 1950s, not least as part of the soundtrack of the 1958 film The Bravados. It had also received a lovely recording in 1960 by the folk duo Bud & Travis. Elvis’s version is played considerably faster, but not so much that the attractive melody is lost, and the end result is not unlike No More from Blue Hawaii.
The recording of eight ballads for one film soundtrack seems something like overkill, but the remaining material is remarkably wide-ranging. The title song is a cover of the Leiber and Stoller song recorded a couple of years earlier by The Coasters. The Coasters’ version was essentially a novelty song, but Elvis and his musicians work it up into a straight-forward rock/pop number. It’s all a little bit repetitive (not to mention shallow), but it has an infectious sense of fun, and Boot Randolph again helps things along with a lengthy instrumental break lasting nearly a minute (of a two and a half minute song).
Return to Sender by Otis Blackwell and Winfield Scott was the obvious choice for a single, and Elvis performs it in a style influenced by Jackie Wilson. It was a considerably stronger track than either Good Luck Charm or She’s Not You, and reached the #2 position in America towards the end of 1962. Once again, it’s a song that straddles both rock ‘n’ roll and pop, and even has a sprinkling of soul thrown in for good measure. Paul Simpson writes of the recording that it “was not just Elvis’s last million-seller for three years, but the last great rock/pop single from a King who was on the point of losing his throne.” That seems slightly contentious, however, given that Devil in Disguise would be released less than a year later and is arguably just as good.
Two of the most interesting songs were also the most unlikely. We’re Comin’ in Loaded and Thanks to the Rolling Sea were written in a way to make them sound like traditional work songs sung by fishermen. Robert Matthew-Walker refers to the latter as a “Darin-like performance,” and he’s certainly not wrong. Over the next eighteen months, Bobby Darin would record two albums of folk songs. The second album, Golden Folk Hits, was of straight-forward covers of the songs at the heart of the then-current folk revival. However, both We’re Comin’ in Loaded and Thanks to the Rolling Sea would have fitted rather snugly on the first album, Earthy, which mixed newly-written folk songs with traditional numbers, gospel, folk songs from around the world, and sea shanties. Elvis takes to this unusual material extremely well, and the a cappella take of Thanks to the Rolling Sea, first issued in 1980, is something of a revelation and makes one wish that Elvis had pursued folk-related material more often. Sadly, however, it was a genre that he only dipped into very occasionally during the rest of his career, most notably with a handful of songs in 1971 and, even then, none of them had much in common with the tracks recorded here.
The Walls Have Ears draws once again on Latin rhythms, but this time the tango. It’s a silly song from the point of view of the lyrics, but Elvis puts in a fine performance and enters into the spirit of it all with his tongue fixed firmly in his cheek as he sings about flinging shoes and parting his hair with a chair. Given the context of the light-hearted film and album, it all works rather well, and Elvis once more seems happy with the Latin rhythm.
The least effective material here are the rockers. I Don’t Wanna Be Tied has moments when it sounds like it is really going to take off, but it is let down by an ineffective bridge section and the fact it’s derivative of the other rock ‘n’ roll material that Elvis had recorded since his return from the army. Ultimately, the only real fire is at the very end, where Elvis lets rip with gusto into a slow, bluesy coda. It is almost as if he only bothered with the rest of the song in order to have the chance to sing those last few seconds.
I Don’t Wanna Be Tied sounds like a masterpiece compared to Plantation Rock, written by the same songwriting team of Giant, Baum and Kaye. One of the lamest rock ‘n’ roll songs that Elvis recorded during his career, there was good reason why this was cut from the film and held back from release for a couple of decades. The recording has an awkward feel from beginning to end, and never really gets off the ground – and this is hardly helped by the dire material.
The film opened to decidedly mixed reviews. Margaret Harford in the Los Angeles Times appeared to lose patience with the pacing of the movie, writing that “whenever this highly original plot threatens rambling boredom (which is about every 60 seconds), Presley or his lustily vocal crew…break into song.” Myles Standish, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was a little kinder, although he also comments on the fact that the “plot is so wispy it almost evaporates in the island sunshine.” The plot is made to look even thinner due to the poor pacing of the movie and, aside from the songs, there is little to keep the viewer interested here. Elvis and co-star Stella Stevens have little rapport or chemistry, which hardly helps the proceedings, and the script doesn’t have the comedy of G. I. Blues or the eccentric cast of characters of Blue Hawaii.
Like the film itself, there was nothing particularly wrong or bad about the soundtrack, it just went on for too long. The emphasis on ballads meant they were getting repetitive and this ultimately took something away from the fine performances most of them received. For his next film, Elvis would find himself back at MGM for the first time since 1957, and the quality of both film and soundtrack would sink to their lowest level yet.
This is a super thread and one of the things I really enjoy about this forum. So much in depth information from different sources... thanks to each of you that have added to Andy's great OP!! Girls! Girls! Girls! is one of Elvis' better soundtracks IMO... while it has a few clunkers, I enjoy several of the songs like Coming In Loaded, I Don't Wanna Be Tied, I Don't Want To, Return To Sender, A Boy Like Me, A Girl Like You and the title song.
