"I'll bring gifts, like you never saw/Priceless garments that you'll adore/Persian rugs to enhance your floor/For the pleasures of love..."

That's Mary Ann Mobley, Miss America 1959, in the 1965 Elvis movie "Harum Scarum." She has died at the age of 75.

"Harum Scarum" was filmed on the set Cecil B. DeMille used for the 1927 movie "The King of Kings" and uses some of the story from the 1921 Rudolph Valentino movie "The Sheik."  

"Harum Scarum" was the only Elvis movie I ever saw in the theater. This was 1965, a year after "Hard Day's Night," where money can't buy you love.



We were free, in the modern world, so what the hell was Elvis doing? He was so ridiculous. We went to the movie to laugh at him. We were like George Harrison, turning down the sound and saying rude things. We'd seen an ad in the teen magazines for "Harum Scarum" and had taken to saying "Harum Scarum" just to make each other laugh.



It seemed so funny that we thought it would be fun to watch the movie as a joke. But it was dreadfully boring. Anyway, the ad is still hilarious — the phallic symbols, the ethnic nonsense, the absurd image of 1950s Elvis blithely unaware — he thinks he's "swingin'" — as Elvis in a Sheik costume is about to poke him in the ass with a knife. As for Mary Ann, she's down there somewhere amongst the little people at his feet. If it's supposed to be a harem, they can't give one woman prominence. So stick her down there between 1950s Elvis's legs, and — because you can't have too many Elvises — put another Elvis down there. "It's Elvis" say the letters across the top, bigger than the movie title. And what was the point of misspelling "harem"? It's not as if matching "scarum" was the idea, "scarum" being a misspelling of "scare 'em." And "You won't believe it when you see it!" Why the hell not? What could possibly be hard to believe about a dumb Elvis movie. He's in a costume? There are a lot of "harem" girls for him? After seeing the damned thing, we said: "You won't believe it when you see it? You won't believe how boring it is."

But that was a half century ago, and so long, Mary Ann.

"Archeologists Dig Up Sphinxes From DeMille’s 'The Ten Commandments' Buried Along Central California Coast."

I love that headline. It's absurd and yet true, literally — because the stuff from the movie really was buried and in need of meticulous excavation of the archeological kind — and more deeply — because it's making me think that all those ancient Egyptian monuments were melodramatic, crowd-awing  spectacle of a piece with Hollywood.

Now that we're talking about the 1927 silent film "King of Kings," we must take note of Ayn Rand.

We were talking about "King of Kings," because we were talking about what Jesus wrote in the sand, because various blogs were talking about an Islamist Facebook page with a cartoon showing how to carry out a stoning. I started to wonder whether the first commenter who mentioned "King of Kings" was talking about the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille picture or the 1961 Nicholas Ray flick. So I'm over here on the King of Kings (1927 film) page at Wikipedia, and I see:

Sally Rand, before becoming notorious for her "fan dance" at the 1933 World's Fair, was an extra in the film.

Ayn Rand (no relation to Sally Rand) also was an extra in the film, and met her future husband Frank O'Connor on set.

I couldn't find a YouTube clip of Ayn Rand in "King of Kings," but I did find Sally Rand and her notorious World's Fair fan dance:



I also found this 2009 New Yorker article about Ayn Rand that covers the "King of Kings" phase:

Rand... left the U.S.S.R. for America.... Her vision of the U.S. had already been shaped by obsessive moviegoing.... Even before leaving the Soviet Union, she had published a pamphlet on the silent-film actress Pola Negri, and like a movie star herself she now refashioned “Rosenbaum” into her own new name. Heller and Burns both knock down the myth that a Remington-Rand typewriter inspired the rechristening.

There is a greater factual basis to the legend of Rand’s having met Cecil B. DeMille before she worked as an extra on his production of “The King of Kings” (1927). On the set, Rand persuaded a costume director to promote her from a crowd of beggars to a crowd of patricians, and DeMille had his story chief look at her film scenarios, which were soon judged over the top. Rand achieved steadier success working in the R.K.O. wardrobe department, and then had a writerly breakthrough with a courtroom murder drama called “Night of January 16th.” Thanks to a gimmick that allowed each night’s audience to serve as the jury and thereby choose the ending, the play made it to Broadway, where Rand railed against the producers’ subordination of its incidental messages about the beauty of unbridled individualism.

Settling in New York with her husband, Frank O’Connor (another “King of Kings” extra), Rand set seriously to work on the first of her two major novels, “The Fountainhead.”....

How do you feel about all those connections? The Soviet Union, the love of movies, immigration to the land of movies, name-changing, finding the love of your life on a movie set in Hollywood, strippers performing what is only the illusion of nakedness, and... Jesus.

One last preen from Oliver Stone.

For some reason, the NYT gives a big, long interview to Oliver Stone, about his movie flop "Alexander," in its "Year in Culture" section.

Q. With movies like this, I think it's very hard to figure out what to do with the element of camp --

A. But it's an epic, you have to go with the concept of heightened dialogue, soaring music, soaring score, soaring theme - man, God, earth. I mean it's classic biblical, too. You know, it came down by Cecil B. DeMille. I wanted to get the language simple and strong like Greek dramas, so it was more like Euripides and also Aeschylus.

Why didn't they write a play about Alexander? Could have easily been a trilogy. Why didn't anybody do that? I mean why didn't Shakespeare touch the guy, or Marlowe or Goethe? He was famous. Nobody touched him. Why? Because there's too much success. He's too much - too much for people.

In spite of the incoherence, that snippet provides some insight into the mind of Stone. He thinks that the grand movie directors -- DeMille and him -- are capable of presenting the grandest stories that are beyond the reach of those stagebound mortals like Shakespeare and Euripides. And if moviegoers didn't get it, it's their damn fault:

With "Alexander" I was ... coming in with a lot of complexity, but at the wrong angle to the American people. They don't see the political parallels between empire-building, between Alexander and George Bush. They see on the surface. They say: "Oh, Alexander's gay. And George Bush isn't." I mean, Bush would have no inclination to see a movie where the guy is gay. If you say that in a headline, you're killing it. Unless you have a certain interest in Alexander. But if you don't know anything about Alexander, "Oh, it's another freaky Colin Farrell picture where he plays a gay guy."

Yes, yes, your movie flopped because Americans are homophobic, ignorant of history, and can't handle complexity. If only we had perceived that "empire" angle, we would have loved your inane pile of crap. How big was that pile of crap? Per Stone:

I feel good, I feel like I've got something out of my system. I feel that I achieved a mountain for myself. A mountain.

UPDATE: As an emailer points out, Euripides and Aeschylus have an airtight excuse for not writing about Alexander. Check the chronology. Stone's history lessons are, as we know, laughable.