REVIEWS

DAVID ENGLISH AND PAL GRANLUND

THE MAKING OF VIVA LAS VEGAS

Follow That Dream (Book/CD Set)

*****

Viva Las Vegas was one of Elvis Presley’s best films of the 1960s, due in no small part to his effervescent co-star Ann-Margret. Their dance scenes in particular were sizzling, evincing a chemistry that led to an off-screen affair as well.

If you’re a fan of the movie, you’ll love digging into this hefty, 400-page tome, which takes you through the entire process of creating the film: pre-production, shooting the movie, recording the soundtrack, and the film’s release. It’s fascinating to read the memos, script pages, and contemporaneous media accounts of the shoot. And it’s illustrated with hundreds of photographs, including many rare shots, making the book a visual feast.

It would have been nice if there were more reviews of the film included (though you do see film posters from different countries). One of the few reviews is from the New York Times, which called the film “as pleasant and unimportant as a banana split.” There’s also an amusing excerpt from a letter to Presley’s manager from film producer Hal Wallis, preparing to work with Presley in Roustabout and concerned about his appearance in Viva Las Vegas. “He looks soft, fat,” the producer notes with alarm, adding that his dyed-black hair is “not at all attractive.” He’ll have to look tougher for Roustabout, the producer warns.

The three CDs provide a nice accompaniment sessions, songs originally intended for a non-soundtrack album, but instead doled out over the years on singles, soundtracks and compilations. The tracks were initially released as a what-could-have-been album in 1990 as and later in expanded form on FTD’s own in 2008. So if you don’t have either of those two albums, it’s a bit more bang for your buck. There’s also a number of songwriter demos, interesting to listen to once, but probably not something you’ll play more than that.