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King of the West
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This weeks feature
Elvis Presley’s movie career, like that of his music, started with a bang in the Fifties, only to become a parody of itself in the Sixties.
After his spell in the Army, he returned to a world that had changed suddenly and dramatically, and he was as unfashionable as, when he first burst out of Memphis, he had been revolutionary.
A lot of the blame for his eclipse in film smust be laid at the door of his manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, who forced him into a seemingly never-ending drudgery of embarrassingly bad musicals, sometimes three or four a year. Early on, however, it seemed as though the King might make a quite decent actor, especially after his performance int he relatively non-musical ‘Flaming Star’, directed by the great Don Siegel. |
The king of rock and roll... |
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The latter is one of the final batch of films released by 20th Century Fox as part of its 70th anniversary celebrations, along with ‘Love Me Tender’, another western that was Presley’s screen debut.
Other classics in the series are the Cary Grant rom-com ‘People Will Talk’; the Gregory Peck bomber pilot drama ‘Twelve O’Clock High’; Robert Mitchum chasing U-boats in ‘The Enemy Below’; James Mason playing General Rommel in ‘The Desert Fox’; Tyrone Power as ‘A Yank In The RAF’; Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn embarking on an office romance in ‘Desk Set’; and the Jules Verne adventure yarns ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Earth’ and ‘Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea’. Cary Grant and Gregory Peck feature again in, respectively, ‘Born To Be Bad’ and ‘The Bravados’; a young Robert Wagner can be seen in the war drama ‘Between Heaven And Hell’; and, finally, there is the evergreen Rome-set romance, ‘Three Coins In The Fountain’. |
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