Elvis Presley on film and television

Elvis Presley became a film star in 1956, and would go on to appear in a total of 33 feature films. He first became interested in acting in his youth; despite later declarations that he had no acting experience, fellow Humes High School students recall that he was often cast as the lead in the Shakespeare plays they studied in English class. He admired actors such as James Dean and Marlon Brando, and reportedly paid close attention to their performing styles long before he ever set foot on a movie set. On March 26–28, 1956, just days after the release of his first album, he did a screen test for Paramount Pictures. Part of the test was an audition for a supporting role in The Rainmaker, starring Burt Lancaster. Screenwriter Allen Weiss compared his acting to that of "the lead in a high school play." Then, to his recording of "Blue Suede Shoes", Presley gave a lip-synced performance, complete with gyrations. In Weiss's description, "The transformation was incredible...electricity bounced off the walls. ... [It was] like an earthquake". In a radio interview two weeks later, Presley excitedly declared that he would be making his motion picture debut in The Rainmaker. The part ultimately went to Earl Holliman.

King Creole (1958) was Presley's personal favorite among his many films.

On April 25, Presley signed a seven-year contract with Paramount that also allowed him to work with other studios. In November, he made his big-screen debut with the musical western Love Me Tender. It was panned by the critics but did well at the box office. The original title—The Reno Brothers—was changed to capitalize on the advanced sales of the song "Love Me Tender". The commercial success led to the release of three more Presley film vehicles over the next twenty months. The singer would go on to star alongside several well-established actors, including Walter Matthau, Carolyn Jones, Angela Lansbury, Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Albertson, Gig Young, and Mary Tyler Moore. An eleven-year-old Kurt Russell made his screen debut in It Happened at the World's Fair (1963).

A couple of Presley's early films, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole (1958), called for relatively dramatic performances. The erotic, if not homo-erotic, dance sequence to the former's title song is often cited as his greatest moment on screen. It was choreographed by Alex Romero after watching Presley himself. Howard Thompson of the New York Times began his review of the latter movie, "As the lad himself might say, cut my legs off and call me Shorty! Elvis Presley can act." But the majority of Presley's movies aimed for little more than reliable returns on modest investments and the promotion of their accompanying soundtrack albums. To maintain box office success, he would later even shift "into beefcake formula comedy mode for a few years."

His first film after his return from the Army, G.I. Blues (1960), directed by Norman Taurog, set the tone. As described by critic Al Clark, it was the "first in a series of nine bland Presley vehicles directed by Taurog, and the film which engendered a career formula of tepid, routine comedy-musicals." Presley at first insisted on pursuing more serious roles, but when two films in a more dramatic vein — Flaming Star (1960) and Wild in the Country (1961) — were less commercially successful, he reverted to the formula. So formulaic that his output has been called "Elvis movies," and a genre unto themselves. For most of the 1960s, during which he made 27 movies, there were few exceptions, such as the non-musical western, Charro!.

Presley's movies were generally poorly received—one critic dismissed them as a "pantheon of bad taste." As a typical comment put it, the scripts "were all the same". It was further noted that the songs seemed to be "written on order by men who never really understood Elvis or rock and roll." Indeed, for Blue Hawaii, "fourteen songs were cut in just three days." Julie Parrish, who appeared in Paradise, Hawaiian Style, says that Presley hated many of the songs chosen for his films; he "couldn't stop laughing while he was recording" one of them. In Sight and Sound (1959) Peter John Dyer wrote that in his movies "Elvis Presley, aggressively bisexual in appeal, knowingly erotic, [was] acting like a crucified houri and singing with a kind of machine-made surrealism." Hal Wallis, who produced nine of Presley's films, also had a reputation for such prestige productions as Becket (1964), starring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, and he received 16 Academy Award nominations for his movies. But Wallis's goals were clearly very different for his most reliably profitable star: "A Presley picture is the only sure thing in Hollywood," he said. Presley later branded Wallis "a double-dealing sonofabitch", realizing there had never been any intention to let him develop into a serious actor. Critics maintained that "No major star suffered through more bad movies than Elvis Presley." According to Priscilla Presley, in the late 1960s, "He blamed his fading popularity on his humdrum movies" and "... loathed their stock plots and short shooting schedules." She also notes: "He could have demanded better, more substantial scripts, but he didn't.".

For all that, Presley's films were indeed commercially successful, and he "became a film genre of his own." On December 1, 1968, the New York Times wrote: "Three times a year Elvis Presley ... [makes] multi-million dollar feature-length films, with holiday titles like Blue Hawaii, Fun in Acapulco, Viva Las Vegas, Tickle Me, Easy Come, Easy Go, Live a Little, Love a Little and The Trouble With Girls. For each film, Elvis receives a million dollars in wages and 50 per cent of the profits. ... [E]very film yields an LP sound-track record which may sell as many as two-million copies." The silver screen gave many of his fans around the world their only opportunity to see him, given the almost complete absence of international appearances by the singer. (The only concerts Presley ever gave outside of the United States were in three Canadian cities in 1957.) Still, as film critic and historian David Thomson asked, "Is there a greater contrast between energy and routine than that between Elvis Presley the phenomenon, live and on record, and Presley the automaton on film?"

Change of Habit (1969) was Presley's final non-concert movie. His films were no longer profitable, for by the late sixties, the Hippie movement had developed and musical acts like Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Grateful Dead, The Doors and Janis Joplin were dominating the airwaves. Therefore, Presley shifted his career back to recording and touring, and his last two theatrical films were concert documentaries in the early 1970s. He was reported to have been offered the starring role in West Side Story (1960), and Jon Voight's role in Midnight Cowboy (1969) but either he or the Colonel turned them down. In 1974, he lost the opportunity to co-star with Barbra Streisand in a big-budget remake of A Star Is Born when Parker demanded 50 percent of the profits from the production along with other extravagant financial demands. With Kris Kristofferson as the male lead, the film became a major hit.

The type of Elvis Presley film varied widely, from the drama of Jailhouse Rock (1957) and King Creole, the latter directed by Michael Curtiz and based on the Harold Robbins 1952 novel A Stone for Danny Fisher, to the light comedies Kissin' Cousins (1964) and Tickle Me (1965). A quote attributed to Elvis Presley in the documentary This is Elvis alleged that some of the films even made him physically ill.

Top grossing movies at the box office

Based on the Box Office Report database, the top grossing Elvis Presley movies based on the yearly Top 20 box office rankings were:

1. Viva Las Vegas (May, 1964, MGM), no. 11 on the list of the top grossing movies of the year in the U.S., $50,613,425
2. Jailhouse Rock (October, 1957, MGM), no. 12, $42,308,531
3. Blue Hawaii (November, 1961, Paramount), no. 13, $47,921,158
4. G.I. Blues (August, 1960, Paramount), no. 15, $44,286,614
5. Loving You (July, 1957, Paramount), tied for no. 15, $40,138,863
6. Girls! Girls! Girls! (November, 1962, Paramount), no. 19, $36,261,386
7. Love Me Tender (November, 1956, Twentieth Century Fox), no. 20, $47,068,788
8. Girl Happy (1965, MGM), no. 25, $29,972,122
9. Kissin' Cousins (1964, MGM), no. 26, $27,507,296
10. Roustabout (1964, Paramount), no. 28, $29,472,103

• Please note that these figures have been adjusted for inflation.

Awards and nominations

Elvis on Tour (1972) won the 1973 Golden Globe award for Best Documentary film. Academy Award-winning director Martin Scorsese was the montage supervisor for the film. Andrew W. Solt was a researcher on the movie.

Anthony Lawrence and Allan Weiss were nominated for the award for Best Written American Musical by the Writers Guild of America for writing the script for the 1964 film Roustabout (1964).

In 2004, Jailhouse Rock (1957) was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Filmography

Year	Film	Role	Trivia
1956	Love Me Tender	Clint Reno	First movie role. The only film in which Presley did not get top billing. He came third, after Richard Egan and Debra Paget.
1957	Loving You	Jimmy Tompkins (Deke Rivers)	The first Elvis film in color. Presley's parents were cast as audience members. After his mother's death in 1958, Elvis never watched this movie again.
	Jailhouse Rock	Vince Everett	Co-star Judy Tyler was killed in a car wreck on July 4, 1957, three days after filming ended. Presley refused to watch the movie as a result. Composer Mike Stoller appears in the movie as the band pianist.
1958	King Creole	Danny Fisher	Presley's favorite of the films he made. This was also the last Elvis movie filmed in black and white. The movie was loosely based on a 1952 novel A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins.
1960	G.I. Blues	Tulsa McLean	The 32nd Armored was Presley's regiment when he was in the army so it was used for the film. The soundtrack album went to No. 1 on Billboard and spent over two years (111 weeks) on the Billboard charts.
	Flaming Star	Pacer Burton	Andy Warhol's famous diptych of Presley as a cowboy came from a shot in this movie.
1961	Wild in the Country	Glenn Tyler	Millie Perkins broke her arm when she had to slap Presley's character.
	Blue Hawaii	Chad Gates	The soundtrack for this movie became Presley's most successful chart album. It spent twenty consecutive weeks on the #1 spot of the Billboard Top LP's chart in 1961-1962. Golden Globe and Tony Award winning actress Angela Lansbury co-starred as Elvis' mother, although in reality she was only 10 years older than him.
1962	Follow That Dream	Toby Kwimper	Shot in Citrus County, Florida and Levy County, Florida.
	Kid Galahad	Walter Gulick / Dustin Holmes / Kid Galahad	The remake of a 1937 film, Gig Young and Charles Bronson co-starred.
	Girls! Girls! Girls!	Ross Carpenter	The only one of his feature films to be nominated for a Golden Globe.
1963	It Happened at the World's Fair	Mike Edwards	Uncredited movie debut of Kurt Russell; he runs on screen and kicks Elvis in the shin.
	Fun in Acapulco	Mike Windgren	Teri Garr makes an uncredited movie debut as an extra, Ursula Andress co-starred.
1964	Kissin' Cousins	Josh Morgan / Jodie Tatum	Elvis' first dual role. Presley loathed the "strawberry blond" wig he had to wear as the hillbilly cousin in this film, in part because it made him look as he had before deciding to dye his hair black in 1957., Jack Albertson co-starred.
	Viva Las Vegas	Lucky Jackson	Elvis had an off-screen romance with his co-star, Ann-Margret. This would be Presley's most successful film at the box office, returning more than $5 million to MGM on an investment of less than $1 million.
	Roustabout	Charlie Rogers	Joan Freeman and Barbara Stanwyck were co-stars. Presley insisted on doing his own stunt work, including a fight scene in which he incurred a head wound.
1965	Girl Happy	Rusty Wells	Shelley Fabares co-starred in one of her three films with Elvis.
	Tickle Me	Lonnie Beale / Panhandle Kid	This is the only movie for which Presley did not record a new soundtrack. All the songs had been recorded between 1960 and 1963 and had already been released.
	Harum Scarum	Johnny Tyronne	The only film Elvis was paid a million dollars to act in, although part was paid in installments. Mary Ann Mobley co-starred, as she had in Girl Happy.
1966	Frankie and Johnny	Johnny	Donna Douglas of The Beverly Hillbillies and Harry Morgan of M*A*S*H were the co-stars.
	Paradise, Hawaiian Style	Rick Richards	At age ten, this was Donna Butterworth's last picture. James Shigeta co-starred.
	Spinout	Mike McCoy	Once again, Shelley Fabares co-starred.
1967	Easy Come, Easy Go	Lt. (j.g.) Ted Jackson	The ship featured in the first part of the movie is the USS Gallant, an ocean-going minesweeper. The movie featured Pat Priest, Elsa Lanchester, and Pat Harrington, Jr., who later played Schneider in the 1970s TV series One Day at a Time.
	Double Trouble	Guy Lambert	Only movie Annette Day ever made. It co-starred Norman Rossington.
	Clambake	Scott Heyward / 'Tom Wilson'	The red sports car in this film is a 1959 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Racer. Also featured: Bill Bixby and Shelley Fabares.
1968	Stay Away, Joe	Joe Lightcloud	Elvis as an Indian rodeo rider. Burgess Meredith played his father.
	Speedway	Steve Grayson	The auto-racing film co-starred Nancy Sinatra, with cameos by NASCAR drivers.
	Live a Little, Love a Little	Greg Nolan	Albert, the Great Dane in the movie, was played by Presley's own dog, Brutus. Presley's father is a model for one of the photo shoots. The movie featured the song "A Little Less Conversation".
1969	Charro!	Jess Wade	Only film in which he was not filmed singing. Also the only movie in which Presley wears a beard. Gunsmoke and Rawhide producer Charles Marquis Warren was the director and screenwriter.
	The Trouble with Girls	Walter Hale	Only Presley release that was part of a double bill, with The Green Slime (1968).
	Change of Habit	Dr. John Carpenter	Playing a doctor who falls for a nun, this would be Presley's last feature film role. Mary Tyler Moore and Edward Asner co-starred prior to their Mary Tyler Moore Show success on TV.
1970	Elvis: That's the Way It Is	As himself	Concert film; shot during Presley's third season in Las Vegas.
1972	Elvis On Tour	As himself	Concert film; 1973 Golden Globe winner for Best Documentary film (it tied with Walls of Fire [1971]).

References

• Bronson, Fred (1985). The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. Billboard. ISBN 0823075222.
• Brown, Peter Harry, and Pat H. Broeske (1997). Down at the End of Lonely Street: The Life and Death of Elvis Presley. Signet. ISBN 0451190947.
• Caine, Andrew (2005). Interpreting Rock Movies: The Pop Film and Its Critics in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0719065380.
• Clark, Al (2005). "G.I. Blues", in Time Out Film Guide (11th ed.), ed. John Pym. Time Out Guides. ISBN 1904978878.
• Elvis movie co-stars interview
• Falk, Ursula A., and Gerhard Falk (2005). Youth Culture and the Generation Gap. Algora Publishing. ISBN 0875863671.
• Guralnick, Peter (1999). Careless Love. The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. Back Bay Books. ISBN 0316332976.
• Guralnick, Peter, and Ernst Jorgensen (1999). Elvis Day by Day: The Definitive Record of His Life and Music. Ballantine. ISBN 0345420896.
• Kirchberg, Connie, and Marc Hendrickx (1999). Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, and the American Dream. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. ISBN 0786407166.
• Lisanti, Tom (2000). Fantasy Femmes of 60's Cinema: Interviews with 20 Actresses from Biker, Beach, and Elvis Movies. McFarland and Company. ISBN 0786408685.
• Marcus, Greil (1980). "Rock Films," The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, second edition. Random House. ISBN 0394739388.
• Ponce de Leon, Charles L. (2007). Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley. Macmillan. ISBN 0809016419.
• Presley, Priscilla (1985). Elvis and Me. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 0399129847.
• Thomson, David (1998). A Biographical Dictionary of Film (3d ed.). Knopf. ISBN 0679755640.
• Victor, Adam (2008). The Elvis Encyclopedia. Overlook Duckworth. ISBN 1585675989.