Elvis's Cinema Legacy Endures
Though he was still selling records and packing arenas when he died 30 years ago next week at age 42, at the time of his death, counterculture tastemakers routinely mocked Elvis Presley's bloated body and could not abide the unabashed sentiment of much of his latterday recordings, nor his apparently hypocritical alliance with Richard Nixon in the war on drugs. To most middlebrow pundits, by the late 1970s the middle-age King of Rock 'n' Roll reigned only over an invisible legion of blue-haired old ladies and obsessive record geeks. Elvis Presley's rebirth and reappraisal as the single greatest pop culture personality of the 20th century has only taken place since his untimely and ungraceful end. It's fitting then, that three decades later, Elvis's death day is observed more reverently than his January birthday. The King is dead, long live the King.
Elvis's short, incandescent life casts a shadow into nearly every corner of American artistic experience. Neither music, nor dance, nor fashion was ever the same after Elvis bent them to his will. For every act in Elvis's American tragedy, there are critical witnesses who will attest to the King's brief supremacy in whatever it was Elvis or his handlers chose to do. Perhaps the most maddeningly undervalued and poorly cultivated kingdom over which Elvis ruled was his movie career — 31 films in all.
As Alfred Wertheimer's iconic 1956 photos of him attest, the camera loved Elvis. His face could be granite one moment and pudding the next. He made plenty of forgettable cookie-cutter bachelor-fantasy musicals such as "Clambake" and "Live a Little, Love a Little" — and they outnumbered the films that captured his vitality and risk. As a result, Elvis's movie years are remembered more for ludicrous song titles like "Yoga Is as Yoga Does" and "No Room To Rumba in a Sports Car" than for any of his charismatic performances.
From the start, producer Hal B. Wallis, the former Warner Bros. box-office golden boy turned independent, showed enough respect for Elvis's earning power to screen test the truck driver's son from Mississippi and ink a deal with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, in 1956 — but not enough respect for Elvis's charisma or undeveloped acting chops to take any casting risks. Wallis's first step after singing Elvis was to loan his newest star out to 20th Century Fox for a ho-hum B-western originally titled "The Reno Brothers" but later rechristened "Love Me Tender" to cross promote Elvis's current hit record.
In his indispensable pre-Internet guide to cult movies, "The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film," author Michael Weldon observes that "Elvis Presley's best films had good directors." Perhaps that's why "Love Me Tender" director Robert D. Webb handled Elvis patiently on set. The King's next two pictures 1957's "Loving You" and "Jailhouse Rock," helmed by the initially scornful Martin and Lewis vet Hal Kantner and MGM's stylistically anonymous Richard Thorpe, respectively, both have their moments. But it wasn't until 1958's "King Creole" that Wallis put Elvis in the hands of a really good director. He was, in fact one of the best.
By the time he agreed to direct "King Creole," Hungarian-born Michael Curtiz was a Hollywood legend in decline. Curtiz's successful run of films in Hungary had resulted in a multi-decade association with Warner Bros., where he made paradigmatic contributions to almost every genre, including "Angels With Dirty Faces," "Casablanca," and "Mildred Pierce." Based on a Harold Robbins potboiler and co-written by Actors Studio member and "Hatful of Rain" playwright Michael Gazzo (unforgettable 14 years later as Frankie Pentangeli in "The Godfather Part II"), "King Creole" was a melodramatic coming of age story that transplanted "Rebel Without a Cause" identity issues from suburban Los Angeles to New Orleans's French Quarter.
In Curtiz's 1930s heyday, the Warner Bros. publicity department dubbed his dynamic signature camera placement and motion "the Curtiz Sock." By the late '50s, however, Curtiz had crafted a series of brooding, partially location-shot films such as "The Breaking Point" and the thinly disguised Bix Beiderbecke biopic "Young Man With a Horn." Both were fatalistic and melancholy coming from the famously autocratic director of "Yankee Doodle Dandy." The dark and occasionally hysterical take on class and crime in "King Creole" fits nicely into Curtiz's later, grim-edged films. Viewed today, it's as if in rushing "King Creole" into production just ahead of Elvis reporting for Army service, Wallis, Colonel Parker, Curtiz, and company sought to load the film with enough drama to hold Elvis's fans over until his return from Germany two years later.
After setting the standard for the assembly-line moribund musicals that would account for most of the rest of his films in 1960's "G.I. Blues," Elvis contributed his finest performance in Don Siegel's "Flaming Star," released the same year. Written by frequent John Ford collaborator Nunnally Johnson, "Flaming Star" was originally intended for Elvis's acting idol, Marlon Brando. Initially leery of his substitute leading man, Siegel, who had been trained by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, was immediately struck by Elvis's on-set dedication. "Elvis could have been an acting star," the director wrote in his memoir. The rocker "surprised me with his sensitivity as an actor."
In order to take advantage of Elvis's potential and keep the film's downbeat Western tragedy from being rendered ridiculous, Siegel (who would go on to direct "Dirty Harry" and "Escape From Alcatraz") ignored Colonel Parker's request that Elvis perform at least 10 songs in the film. Not including the theme, Elvis performs only one number in "Flaming Star," and that's in the first five minutes of the film. And like Curtiz, Siegel surrounded Elvis with capable pros as co-stars. John McIntire and Dolores del Rio both contribute heartbreaking moments, and the King himself rose to the occasion in what was to be his most singularly tragic role and his most affecting.
"I've been killed already," Elvis's literally star-crossed half-breed character Pacer Burton tells his brother near the end of the film. Pacer's fate would be the last act of Elvis's dramatic screen career. Imprisoned by the Colonel's indifference to anything other than cheap formula filmmaking, boxoffice receipts, and marquee recognition, Elvis would never again come close to the performance that Siegel coaxed from him in "Flaming Star."
The King would make 25 more films before his death three decades ago next week. But, excepting his '70s concert films and director George Sydney's 1964 musical confection "Viva Las Vegas," Elvis Presley's promising film career effectively ended in 1960.
