August 1st
Elvis Presley never stays out of the cultural conversation for very long. Perhaps the most obvious candidate for “needs no introduction” status, Presley burst onto the music scene in the mid-1950s, scoring his first number one hit on the Billboard charts with “Heartbreak Hotel.” Presley went to have more gold and platinum-certified albums than any other musical act. With a billion sales worldwide, he was named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling solo artist ever.
It doesn’t get bigger than Elvis. He lived only 42 years, and his legend has only grown in the 45 years since he died. Every decade or so, “The King,” as he’s known, gets a revival. In the early-80s, the opening of his famed Memphis home Graceland gave his fanbase a mecca. The documentary film This is Elvis (1981) pieced together the legend of his life. The steady stream of Vegas impersonators and pop references exposed him to new generations. In 2002, the release of “ELV1S: 30 #1s Hits” relaunched the brand once again, becoming one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century and spawning a remixed single version of “A Little Less Conversation,” produced by JXL, which went number one in countries around the world.
Most people, however, don’t know that “A Little Less Conversation” was a blip of a single upon release in 1968, and was simply a quick song placed in the middle of one the last in Presley’s series of movie musicals. Live a Little, Love a Little (1968), like the single, didn’t make a big impact with audiences. It was positioned at a precarious time in Presley’s career. After eight years of doing little more than making musicals and releasing soundtrack albums, his cultural relevance had waned, and his image, once raw and sexual, had morphed into something family-friendly, squeaky clean and a little cheesy.
When Presley initially started making movies, the idea had been for him to be a kind of singing James Dean or Marlon Brando. The four films he made in the 1950s before being drafted into service showcase a much different star than the boy-next-door character that would become commonplace a decade later. After a supporting turn in Love Me Tender (1956), Presley electrified audiences in Jailhouse Rock (1957) and Loving You (1957). With the Michael Curtiz directed King Creole (1958), Presley showed a potential for dramatic chops.
But his trajectory would change after being drafted into the service in 1958 and spending two years away from performing. Managed by the notorious Colonel Tom Parker, Presley returned in 1960 to a public hungry for new material and new movies. He was rushed into the musical comedy G.I. Blues (1960), which highlighted a clean-cut Presley in a parent-approved romance complete with sweet songs your mom might listen to like “Wooden Heart.” Subsequent dramatic efforts, like Flaming Star (1960) and Wild in the Country (1961) were successful at the box office, but the over/under return of the musical comedies was far greater. Even more importantly, the soundtrack albums of these films, usually stocked with a record-full of tunes, doubled the money. The Blue Hawaii (1961) album, for instance, was certified 3x Platinum by the RIAA.
The Colonel cut lucrative movie deals for a series of films that were made on the cheap but demanded large salaries for Presley and, of course, Colonel Tom Parker, who took a shocking portion of Presley’s earnings.
At their best, the Elvis movies have an innocent charm. They almost uniformly involve The King cast in some kind of “cool” job – a nightclub act, a race car driver, a carnival handyman or a crop dusting pilot. He meets a girl, he woos her and after a series of hijinks they end up together. Fade out.
The formula works especially well in Viva Las Vegas (1964). Paired with the equally charismatic Ann-Margret, fresh off her turn in the Elvis-inspired Bye Bye Birdie (1963), the movie is a zippy 85-minutes of entertainment, set to now-classic tunes like the title track and “What’d I Say.” It’s fun, frothy and light.
As is Girl Happy (1965), Elvis’ answer to the recent string of teen-vacation films like Where the Boys Are (1960), that matches him against his most-frequent leading lady, Shelley Fabares. Fabares, who scored her own number one hit in 1962 with “Johnny Angel,” would also appear in Spinout (1966) and Clambake (1967).
The Colonel often avoided having The King cast against someone of anywhere-approaching-equal star power, both for finances and to keep Presley as the above-title commodity, but occasional steers outside the convention are interesting, including Speedway (1968), which includes a newly famous Nancy Sinatra. That film also included a common “Elvis movie” trope: scenes with Presley being a really swell guy to a little kid, singing a song especially geared toward being saccharine. The “good guy taking care of a kid” element figures prominently in It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963), which interestingly also includes a cameo from a young Kurt Russell, who would go on to play Presley in the television film Elvis (1979).
The cheaper produced Presley films, though, would always do as well as the ones with bigger budgets. The identical-cousin-plotted Kissin’ Cousins (1964), was made on a shoestring budget and looks it, but the profit margin was impressive. So as the decade wore on, less and less attention was paid to the quality of the movies themselves.
By the time 1967 rolled around, Presley was frustrated with the formula. When forced to perform a version of “Old MacDonald” for the Double Trouble (1967), Presley stormed out of the recording studio.
In 1968, Presley began to take back the reins of his career, ultimately marking a triumphant return as a musical artist that December with what is now known as the “Comeback” television special. Non-soundtrack singles came back into the fold for the artist, with mammoth hits in songs like “Suspicious Minds,” “In the Ghetto” and “Burning Love.”
Before his acting career ended, Presley made a couple of attempts to break from his stale movie mold. He took on a serious western with Charro! (1969), played a doctor in love with Mary Tyler Moore’s nun in Change of Habit (1969) and starred as the manager of a Chautauqua in the 1920s-based The Trouble with Girls (1969). These movies were lighter on songs, heavier on story, but the quality never quite reached Presley’s earliest output.
Turning back to full-time performing, Presley stopped acting entirely in the 1970s, although he almost took the lead role in Barbra Streisand’s version of A Star is Born (1976). Legend has it Colonel Tom Parker didn’t want Presley to share top billing and demanded an outrageous sum for the project, effectively sabotaging Presley’s chance at a movie-comeback.
The King did, however, release two more concert documentary films in his lifetime, including Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972).
And Hollywood has never lost its fascination with Presley, all the way up to the recent box office hit Elvis (2022), directed by Baz Lurhmann and starring Austin Butler as The King and Tom Hanks as The Colonel.
While his filmography never reached the creative heights of his discography, Elvis Presley’s easy charm and charisma remain a favorite for classic film fans, and even in their cheese, his incredible voice is always able to cut through and deliver a few good songs.
