Elvis made more than thirty movies, and while nobody ever claimed that he was one of the great actors of his generation – a rockin’ Gielgud or a quiffed Brando – what he did, he actually did very well. He was never under any allusions about his own acting abilities, and often sent himself up, but his work brought in the paying customers and sent them home happy. And though of course he only came to films because of his singing career, his movie tally equates to a damn good career in its own right. You’d retire a happy man if you could claim to have made that number of high-profile films in your acting lifetime. In a far longer working career Brando ‘only’ made forty films; including walk-on parts, Steve McQueen made thirty.

What is amazing is how quickly Elvis appeared in Hollywood once he had seen his first rock ‘n roll hits. Heartbreak Hotel was recorded in January 1956 in Nashville, and was to be his undisputed break-through hit – a number one in the both the Billboard charts and the country lists, and a platinum seller twice over (though it was his seventeenth released single). In the UK Elvis’s singles entered the charts no fewer than eleven times in 1956; starting with Heartbreak Hotel and ending the year with the re-entry of I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine (sitting in the charts for a total of 90 weeks in all). And in the middle of that year Elvis was already on set making his first film.

He first auditioned in Hollywood in late March of ’56, just after his first album was released, screen-testing for Paramount. A rather dismissive report from the time (by the writer Allen Weiss) said that the performance was ‘High School standard’, but when he did an impromptu lip-sync to Blue Suede Shoes, ‘… the transformation was incredible; electricity bounced off the walls.’ Encourage by the apparent success of the audition, Elvis jumped ahead of himself and told a journalist that he was going to be starring in a movie called The Rainmaker, alongside Burt Lancaster. He didn’t. The part went to Earl Holliman (who the same year acting in the classic Giant alongside James Dean, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor – and was in several great westerns, including Gunfight At The OK Corral, The Sons Of Katie Elder and Last Train From Gun Hill). A month later though Paramount did sign him up, offering him seven films with them but – atypically - allowing him to work for other studios as well.

In Love Me Tender, Elvis played the unlikely-named Clint Reno, the only one of four brothers who had not gone off to fight in the Civil War (for the Confederacy – in a cavalry regiment, which was a rarity as both sides fielded very small numbers of cavalrymen during the war). It was his only film where he didn’t get top billing. His name came third, behind Richard Egan, who played his elder brother Vance, and Debra Paget, who played Vance’s girlfriend – who Clint had married while he was away.

Born in 1923, Egan had appeared in well over a dozen films before coming to Love Me Tender, and was an established – if unexciting – screen actor. He died relatively young, in 1987, just before his sixty-sixth birthday. Love Me Tender was Debra Paget’s twentieth film. Eighteen months older than Elvis and originally from Denver, Colorado, she had been acting since the age of eight, and had acted in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives Of Windsor at the age of thirteen. She embarked on her first movie, Cry Of The City, in 1948, and had worked with Cecil B de Mille on his famous epic The Ten Commandments just before she began filming with Elvis.

The film was to be called The Reno Brothers, but 20th Century Fox changed it to cash in on Elvis’s hit single. Love Me Tender, which he performed for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show on September 9, days before its release and more than two months before the film came out, was an adaptation of a song from the 1860s. Originally called Aura Lee, the music was by one George R Poulton, with lyrics by W W Fosdick. It first appeared in 1861, at the start of the war, and was first taken up by cadets at the West Point Military Academy. It then became a standard for barber shop quartets before Ken Darby updated the lyrics and Elvis launched it into the commercial stratosphere; the day after that performance on the Ed Sullivan show record stores registered advance sales in excess of one million copies.

 

Elvis picked up a guitar and sang during the film, setting a scene which would be repeated so many more times, in many more unlikely settings, but eventually comes to a sticky end. He defends his brothers from a charge of armed train robbery and finally gets a slug in his chest for his troubles. All in all, it wasn’t a bad film. You got a real sense of the chaos and impoverishment in the South after 1865, and the way that families which had been torn apart often struggled to put themselves back together again. Shot in black and white, it was a directed by Robert D Webb.

 

Interestingly, Elvis was recruited to play his role in Love Me Tender as a straight actor. There was no singing in the original script. The producers added his performances to, again, capitalise on his massive, new-found popularity. The film did not produce a spin-off album for Elvis, as half of his movies would do in future; just an EP.

 

We can only speculate where the initiative for Elvis to start making movies originated, and it’s easy to assume that it was Colonel Tom Parker’s idea. It was far from uncommon for popular singers to shift over to Hollywood. The best example was Frank Sinatra; he was an unaccredited background singer on film as early as 1941, and had named roles two years later. Part of the impetus certainly came from Elvis himself though. During his school days he took a keen interest in drama and even played Shakespearean leads in college productions. Friends from those days said that he studied the way stars like Brando and James Dean moved and held themselves – which makes a lot of sense when you analyse his stage persona.

 

His next film was Loving You, released in 1957 and directed by Hal Kanter as his debut directorial job. Elvis’s singing cowboy character was called Deke Rivers – yes, another daft name – and, now with his name in very big letters on the top of the bill, he played opposite the very wholesome Glenda Markle. Elvis got to drive hot rods and punch baddies, but although the film was another commercial success – of course – Loving You wasn’t a riveting movie. It did set the scene though for one which was.

 

Jailhouse Rock was released just months after Loving You, in October 1957, and was a very daring film for its time. Its hero – Elvis’s character Vince Everett – was a wrongly-convicted con who had learned to sing in a high security prison. Once out he gets a job singing in a low bar, and meets the girl who is going to turn his life around. Elvis’s character is a short-tempered social misfit – quite unlike the charming, self assured Elvis – and the film ends with him finding that he can still sing, despite a fight which damaged his throat and therefore threatened his career.

 

The highlight of the movie – and one of the undoubted highlights of Elvis’s film career – is the terrific routine in which he sings the title song. It’s deservedly famous, so I don’t need to bang on about it, but if you think it looks innovative and exciting nowadays, imagine what it was like seeing that in your local Odeon in 1957. Though the camera work looks very slow and static by modern standards (there’d be a hundred times as many edit points these days), it was pure rock ‘n roll dynamite.

 

The following year Elvis starred in another classic – King Croele, adapted from the best-selling novel by Harold Robbins, A Stone For Danny Fisher, which was published six years earlier. Producer Hal Wallis had bought the rights to the book with James Dean in mind for the title role of the eponymous hero – a bad boy, who turns good eventually of course, never far from trouble. When Jimmy Dean (who – unimaginably – would have been 79 this February!) died in September ’55, Wallis put the project to one side, but three years later realised that he could add music and make it a vehicle for Elvis.

 

Again, the high point of the film is Elvis singing the title song – a brilliant composition by Leiber and Stoller in itself – and playing acoustic guitar, in a club and in front of a big band. Elvis always said that it was his favourite film, and thought he gave the best performance of his career. His co-stars included Vic Morrow and Walter Matthau, who would both go on to see illustrious careers.

 

Elvis wasn’t to make another film until 1960. Less than two weeks after the filming for King Creole finished, he reported to the Memphis Draft Board office and began his army career. He returned to civilian life in May 1960, quite rightly nervous that both his singing and film-making careers might be over. The public hadn’t forgotten him though, and out of six singles released that year, he had three number ones – all platinum sellers – with Stuck On You, It’s Now Or Never and Are You Lonesome Tonight.

 

Elvis starred in two films that year; GI Blues and Flaming Star. The second was a western, and to be honest, wasn’t good (though it was immortalised by Andy Warhol’s portrait of Elvis dressed as a cowboy, which was a still from the film). GI Blues was better, and – guess what – capitalised on his military service. The Army co-operated with the filming, seeing it as good public relations; the hardware was provided by the 32nd Armored Division, in which he had served. The producer, Hal Wallis, started work on the movie some eight or nine months before Elvis was demobbed, and visited him at his unit in Germany to get a feel for Army life.

 

GI Blues produced an eleven-track LP, which went to number one in the States, and contained a new recording of Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes. The album almost eclipsed the film, spending all of 111 weeks in the Billboard LP charts. The soundtrack was awarded a Grammy and the film also picked up an award for Best Musical.

 

The soundtrack for Elvis’s next film, Wild In The Country, was recorded in late 1960, and filming began the following spring – for a June launch. Elvis plays a rough-neck again, who this time redeems himself by becoming a writer. The best song in the movie is I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell, and the other fact of note is that Elvis embarked on a brief affair with one of his co-stars, Tuesday Weld. She had been a child model and had quite a reputation by the time she and Elvis met, but the romance ended after Colonel Tom Parker warned Elvis off (she starred in many good parts over the decade, but also became well-known for turning down superb roles – including Bonnie in Bonnie And Clyde and the lead in Rosemary’s Baby).

 

Wild In The Country is not a great film, and it’s true to say that most of Elvis’s Sixties films suffered from being made too quickly and too cheaply, and were based on thin, second-rate scripts. Though, having said that, I immediately have to contradict myself, because his next role was in the biggest budget production to date – Blue Hawaii. Playing on his experience in the Army, Elvis is Chad Grant, just back from service in Europe and now home in Honolulu. The script is a bit different in that Chad comes from a wealthy family, waited on by servants, and indeed he drives a beautiful cherry red MGA with pristine whitewalls.

 

The film was a huge commercial success, but it achieved that by being aimed very squarely at the mass market. It had none of the rawness of Jailhouse Rock, and at times is downright cheesy. The film ends with Chad proposing to his girl friend and announcing that he’s starting a tourism business; all very respectable and not at all rock ‘n roll. At the time it was a bit like that point where your mum, watching The Beatles on Sunday Night At The London Palladium, announced that she thought they probably quite nice lads really … so you instantly switched your allegiance to The Stones.

 

For my money, Angela Lansbury steals the film, playing Elvis’s over protective and social status-aware, ex-southern belle of a mother. Angela said it was the most embarrassing performance of her career, but she gets all the laughs (and was less than ten years older than him, rather too small a gap to be his mom).

 

The next few films - Follow That Dream, Kid Galahad, Girls Girls Girls, It Happened At The World’s Fair, Fun In Acapulco (with Ursula Andress) and Kissin’ Cousins (with Elvis in a blond wig!) were cheap, undistinguished, and devoid of talented or interesting co-stars, and do prove my point about Elvis’s mid-Sixties roster of movies… but that brings us to a another true classic.

 

The story line of Viva Las Vegas is pretty daft (for one thing, girl falls, reluctantly, for a racing driver and having snared him, immediately tries to get him to give up racing), but it’s a wonderfully vivacious, high energy film. Elvis lines up alongside exotic Sixties pin-up Ann-Margaret (who also found her way under Elvis’s counterpane in real life) and the result if delicious. The scene where Elvis’s character, Lucky Jackson, sings the title song is great, and Ann-Margaret sexily shedding her white fur coat and elbow-length gloves during her dance routine is wonderful, but the real killer is Elvis and A-M’s vivacious performance of the Ray Charles song, What D’I Say? Elvis (and company) at his very best; he was back, if not to rock ‘n roll, then to raunchy, good time r ‘n b.

 

Viva Las Vegas was the eleventh most successful film of the year, in commercial terms, taking more than $5 million at the box office in the US (1964 was also the year of Mary Poppins, A Hard Day’s Night, Doctor Strangelove, My Fair Lady and Zorba The Greek!). The album of the film was another huge success, spending twenty weeks at number one.

 

Girl Happy and Tickle Me followed in 1965, in which he played Rusty Wells and Lonnie Beale respectively. Tickle Me was the only one of his movies which didn’t merit a soundtrack album.

 

Roustabout - co-starring Barbara Stanwyck - in which Elvis plays travelling circus worker Charlie Rogers, does at least see him on a motorcycle (albeit a Japanese machine), but it isn’t a favourite of mine. These films were earning money though. Elvis was paid one million dollars for Roustabout, which was such a big sum for the studio they had to pay it instalments. The dreadful Harum Scarum appeared in ‘65, in which Elvis dresses up as an Arab. Hideous.

 

It really was becoming a production line. Elvis made three films in ’62, just two in ’63, but then three each year for the rest of the decade. The story lines were always much the same, and the only major difference was the increasingly unlikely setting – and the name of Elvis’s character. In Frankie And Johnny he was a gambler on a Mississippi rover boat; he was a helicopter pilot (back in the fiftieth state) in Paradise, Hawaiian Style; Spinout saw him racing cars (again); in Easy Come, Easy Go he was a diver looking for lost treasure.

 

Elvis was a singer touring Europe in Double Trouble in 1967 – though unfortunately for him he never actually left Hollywood. Elvis was required to sing Old McDonald Had A Farm, which he loathed; indeed he told his wife that it was the lowest point of his career. He received an assurance that the performance wouldn’t be included on the soundtrack LP … but it was. One small note of interest; the movie also starred Norman Rossington (who lived near me in the Eighties!), who had also been in The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night!.

 

On it went; in Clambake he’s a water-skiing instructor, and inStay Away Joe he’s rodeo rider; in Speedway he’s a NASCAR racer (which co-starred Nancy Sinatra – who Elvis was in awe of), and in Live A Little, Love A Little he’s a newspaper photographer (accompanied by a Great Dane called Albert, who was played by Elvis’s own dog, Brutus. In Charro he’s a bearded, spaghetti western-era Clint Eastwood figure, and then in Change Of Habit he’s a doctor who falls for a nun (played by Mary Tyler Moore).

 

Change Of Habit was Elvis’s last film as an actor. In 1974 the producers of the re-make of A Star Is Born offered the male lead to Elvis, but Tom Parker insisted that the female lead, Barbra Streisand, shouldn’t have equal billing with Presley, and the deal fell apart. It was a bad move on Parker’s part; Elvis would have relished the role – entailing ‘real’ acting and a decent script, as it did – and with Kris Kristofferson opposite Streisand it was a great success.

 

In the Seventies Elvis looked back at his film career with dissatisfaction. There was a small number of films he was proud of, but he thought that the Sixties production run movies had contributed to his fall from favour. Be that as it may, at the time they allowed fans worldwide to see and hear their idol, and the majority were solidly commercial. His wasn’t an Oscar winning movie career by any means, but it was a career with which very many actors would have been delighted. Elvis’s films did exactly what they were designed to do.

 

ELVIS’S GREATEST BOX OFFICE HITS

 

			Position that year	American box office gross
1	Viva Las Vegas	1964	11th	$5.152 million
2	Jailhouse Rock	1957	12th	$3.9 million
3	Blue Hawaii	1961	13th	$4.7 million
4	GI Blues	1960	15th	$4.3 million
5	Loving You	1957	15th	$3.7 million
6	Girls! Girls! Girls!	1962	19th	$3.6 million
7	Love Me Tender	1956	20th	$4.2 million
8	Girl Happy	1965	25th	$3.1 million
9	Kissin’ Cousins	1964	26th	$2.8 million
10	Roustabout	1964	28th	$3 million

 

TOP ELVIS SOUNDTRACK LPs IN THE US

 

CHART POSITION
1	Love Me Tender
1	GI Blues
1	Blue Hawaii
1	Roustabout
2	King Creole
3	Girls! Girls! Girls!
3	Fun In Acapulco