In June, 1953, Elvis Presley graduated from Hume High School in Memphis, Tennessee. He had been the cool guy in his school, the kind of guy who slicked back his hair with rosewater and Vaseline and had sideburns and hung out on Beale Street and listened to music coming from the nightclubs. While he often wore flashy clothes, his family lived in a small two-bedroom apartment in a public housing facility known as the Lauderdale Courts.
After graduating from high school, he got a job as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company, but he wanted to be a singer. A rock ‘n roll singer. Nobody really believed in him much, though. After one audition, a band leader told him to stick to being a truck driver.
Still, he stuck at it, and less than three years later RCA issued his first album, Elvis Presley (with that iconic cover that was later emulated by The Clash in their landmark 1979 album London Calling). As his career as a singer was skyrocketing, he signed a deal to go after the other dream he wanted to pursue—the movies. Paramount Pictures signed him to a seven-year movie deal, and by the end of the year he was in his first picture, Love Me Tender (1956).
Over the next 13 years, he made 31 movies.
Let’s be frank, most of them are pretty bad. They’re not offensively bad or poorly made. They’re just, well, a bit lame. The premises are inane, the scripts are dull, and there’s almost never a good cast around him. The only thing to recommend them is of course the music. Plus, his movies are almost universally good-natured. I can’t really call them comedies and they aren’t really dramas. They’re just fun. An innocuous story is punctuated by singing and some dancing, some chaste romancing, nice weather, and lots of the kinds of shirts Cosmo Kramer wore in Seinfeld.
And dialogue like this:
A woman enters his hotel room wearing a fuzzy pink bathrobe and a slinky nightgown.
“I need a hot bath,” she says, seductively.
“No,” says Elvis. “You need a cold shower.”
Wince. Noel Coward or Ben Hecht screenwriting this ain’t.
Elvis had wanted to carve out a screen career emulating his film idols of James Dean and Marlon Brando. Instead, he ended up with a screen career more along the lines of Dean Jones and Ken Berry. Instead of smoldering edgy films like Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1958), he ended up with movies that more resembled That Darn Cat (1965).
Do I still enjoy Elvis movies? Of course I do! They’re silly, insubstantial, and fun. These are weighty times we have all been living through of late, with plenty to ponder, feel sad about, or despair of. An evening of Blue Hawaii (1961) and a big bowl of popcorn probably isn’t going to make all of this go away, but it wouldn’t hurt, either.
In fact, here’s a challenge for you. Watch this clip and tell me you don’t end up smiling and singing along…
This isn’t great cinematic art, but it made you feel better and probably smile. And in these times that is worth a lot.
In the years following Elvis’s final movie in 1969, his life started to fall apart. He divorced, fell deep into drug addictions and health problems, went into a couple of comas from overdoses, and finally, in August of 1977, he died in his bathroom, a bloated and nearly unrecognizable version of the dazzling, energetic, athletic, and joyful performer that America fell in love with. And may have loved to death.
Whenever I think about Elvis, I think about the opening lines to Williams Carlos Williams’ 1824 poem “To Elsie”:
The pure products of America
Go crazy.
Here are five Elvis movies you should consider putting in your queue. They are mainly silly, inept, artless, happy, bright-spirited and most importantly, fun.
Elvis’s first film, this is a black and white Western with musical numbers. I would hesitate to call it a musical. Elvis was just three years out of high school and his musical career was in supernova mode when this movie was made.
This is actually a reasonably okay picture. It tells a version of the story of the Reno Brothers, a gang operating in the Midwest during and after the Civil War. They were the first train robbers. Anywhere. Elvis plays the younger Reno brother who stayed home and looked after his mother.
The film features four songs, all written or co-written by Presley, including the title track. The movie originally was going to be called “The Reno Brothers,” but Love Me Tender was pre-released as a single and turned into an enormous hit, so the film was retitled.
When Elvis was first beginning to perform as a teenager, he often suffered from stage fright. When the band went into the instrumental section of a song, Elvis began shaking his legs nervously. This nervous leg swaying while wearing baggy pants drove his teenage girls audiences wild, unintentional though it originally was. You can see the early versions of this style in the musical numbers here. If you like 1950s Westerns, this is a good one for you to rent.
This makes it on the list mainly because of the title musical number. It’s widely considered one of the greatest song and dance numbers in American film. The famed MGM choreographer Alex Romero—fascinated by Presley’s stage presence and movements—designed the choreography for this vibrant and exciting number specifically for him.
Set on a spartan two-level, stylized jail and prison cafeteria, Presley’s dancing here is the best of his career. The brutally raw power of his voice is almost shocking. The format of the choreography is a principal dancer (Elvis) and a corps de ballet. If you want to see another dance number of this type and quality, check out Judy Garland’s Get Happy from Summer Stock (1950).
The story here has Elvis as a young man sent to prison for manslaughter (the other guy kinda had it coming) and he has a cellmate who notices his musical ability. Well, I guess you can figure out how it goes from there.
The story on the soundtrack is a classic Hollywood story. Legendary songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller were hired to write the songs. They took the advance, went to New York, partied, and did no work at all. Frustrated, after several months, the producers sent out an emissary who shut the two songwriters into a hotel room, blocking the door with a sofa. Four hours later they asked to be let out, having composed I Want To Be Free, Treat Me Nice, (You’re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care, and, of course, Jailhouse Rock. Whoa. You know, sometimes it’s easy to be gloomy about this country and our long history of troubles and divisions and viciousness and sorrows… but then I think, yeah, but we can also make stuff like this.
And when you watch this, as Nigel Pufnal says in This is Spinal Tap (1984), crank the volume up to 11.
This is Presley’s best movie, which, admittedly, is a pretty low bar. But really, this is a seriously decent movie.
Elvis stars in this gritty tale of life in working class New Orleans. He’s Danny, a high school dropout working a couple jobs to support the family after his grieving father, who is unemployed and unable to work because of his despair over the death of his wife. Danny gets discovered while working as a busboy in a nightclub run by Walter Matthau, whose character’s nickname is “Pig.” (A clue to his character).
Presley plays nervous and shy and vulnerable exceptionally well here, and it’s an overall excellent performance. This was, reportedly, his favorite character of all his movie roles. That’s probably because it was written so close to who he was as a young man in his late teens trying to figure out his place in the world.
The screenplay by Herbert Baker and Michael Gazzo received a Writers’ Guild nomination for best screenplay, and deservedly so. The film was directed by Michael Curtiz, the guy who directed Casablanca (1942). The soundtrack has 11 songs and includes one of my favorite Elvis songs, Hard Headed Woman by Claude Demetrius.
Elvis plays Chad Gates, the heir to a pineapple farming fortune who gets out of the Army and just wants to party and surf and hang out with his girlfriend. His parents, however, want him to buckle down and run the family pineapple business. And that, pretty much, is the entire story. His mother is played by 36-year-old Angela Lansbury, while Elvis was 27 when the film was made. Yikes.
The main attraction of this movie is its almost non-stop soundtrack. There are 14 songs, including Can’t Help Falling In Love, Blue Hawaii, Rock-a-Hula Baby, and his cover of the Hawaiian traditional song, Aloha Oe. Let’s be honest, the dialogue here is pretty terrible, but the music is just about irresistible. This is the kind of movie that will only cheer you up, especially on a gloomy winter evening.
At last, the movie we all needed: a boxing musical! Again, Elvis is a guy who just got out of the military, except he’s not an heir to a pineapple fortune, he just is a car mechanic who can throw a punch. Plus, to further entice you, it’s got Charles Bronson!
This movie is a remake of the original 1937 version that starred Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart. Now that was a pretty good movie, this one, not as much. But the original, I would point out, doesn't have six Elvis songs! So take that!
Included in this film is the utterly lovely song I Got Lucky (by Fred Wise and Ben Weisman) and is an excellent example of what Elvis could bring to a song. It’s the most banal of love songs, but here he sings it in the upper part of his range in a sweet tenor voice. I just love it, and the movie is worth it for this song alone.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.