FOCUS ON MOVIES (196067)

E LVIS I S B ACK
Elvis leaves Germany on March 2 at 5:25 p.m., arriving in New Jersey the next day for a press conference. He is officially discharged from active duty on March 5, 1960, at 9:25 a.m. He boards a train for Memphis, arriving on March 8. Press and crowds of fans are everywhere for this historic series of events. He holds a press conference at Graceland in his fathers office behind the mansion on March 8. He has served his country just like any other G.I., with no special privileges his celebrity status might have afforded him. These two years away from his career have been a time to mature. He has also worried constantly that his lengthy absence might have damaged his career March 20, progress. 1960

Elvis has his first post-Army recording session. Some of the recording work is for the album Elvis is Back!, which will hit #2 on the Billboard pop chart. The album includes the single Stuck On You, which is rushed to the pressing plant and packaged in a generic sleeve without waiting for orders. Debuting at #84, it took only three weeks to hit #1. Sessions will continue in early April. In March 26,1960 Elvis tapes a special "Welcome Home, Elvis" edition of Frank Sinatras ABC-TV variety show, for which he is paid $125,000, a record sum for a variety show appearance at the time.

In April 21,1960 Elvis begins filming and recording for his first post-Army movie, his fifth film, GI Blues, for Paramount. This is the third of nine Elvis films to be produced (not consecutively) by Hal Wallis. GI Blues co-stars dancer/actress Juliet Prowse.

ELVIS PRESLEY FILMOGRAPHY

Elvis Presley became a film star in 1956 with Love Me Tender, and would go on to appear in a total of 33 feature films (31 musicals and two concert documentaries). Despite a strong, promising start to his acting career with films like Love Me Tender, Jailhouse Rock, andKing Creole, Presley's films, following his return from his military obligation, whilst at the same time keeping profits high. Although critically panned throughout the 1960s, Presley's films were mostly well received by his fans, and led to Hal B. Wallis, who produced nine of Presley's films, to describe them as "the only sure thing in Hollywood. 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. And others

who would later become famous, like as an 11-year-old Kurt Russell, making his screen debut in It Happened at the World's Fair (1963). Presley left Hollywood and returned to live performing in 1969, and following the success of his sell out tours and Las Vegas shows, he allowed cameras to film him in concert and backstage in the early 1970s. One of these films, Elvis on Tour, won the 1973 Golden Globeaward for Best Documentary film.

IN HOLLYWOOD
SCREEN TESTS
Presley 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 [3] before he ever set foot on a movie set. On March 2628, 1956, just days after the release of his first album, he did a screen test for Paramount Pictures. His first screen test, a scene from the William Inge play The Girls of Summer, resulted in drama coach Charlotte Clary declaring to [4] her class of students, "Now that is a natural born actor". Another 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 [5] earthquake". In a radio interview two weeks later, Presley excitedly declared that he would be [6] [7] making his motion picture debut in The Rainmaker. The part ultimately went to Earl Holliman.

19561958
On April 25, Presley signed a seven-year contract with Paramount and producer Hal Wallis that [8] also allowed him to work with other studios. Wallis, who had produced classics such as Casablanca, Little Caesar, and The Maltese Falcon, had promised Presley that he would look [9] for dramatic roles to let the singer take his acting career seriously. Wallis considered Presley for a role in The Rat Race, a film about a "naive, innocent boy" who was struggling to make it as a musician in Manhattan, but he decided against it after another studio executive said, "Elvis [10] Presley just doesn't look like that". The film was eventually made in 1960 with Tony Curtis in the lead role. Another possible idea that Wallis mulled over was to pair Presley with Jerry Lewis. Lewis had just separated from his comedy partner Dean Martin after a successful run of [10] seventeen movies together, but again the idea was shelved. Eventually Wallis loaned Presley out to Twentieth Century-Fox, and in November, he made his big-screen debut with the musical western Love Me Tender. The original titleThe Reno Brotherswas changed to capitalize on the advanced sales of the song "Love Me Tender". Presley was not too upset about the addition of the title song, he quite liked it, but when several [11] more songs were added he blasted them as "garbage" and "silly songs". The film was

generally panned by the critics, although a number of them viewed it in a positive light. The Los Angeles Times wrote: "Elvis can act. S'help me the boy's real good, even when he isn't [12] [13] singing". Despite mostly negative reviews, the film did well at the box office, generating [14] $540,000 in its first week alone. Although Presley was angered by the addition of songs to his film, the fans loved them. The success of both the single and EP set the tone for every Presley picture that was to follow, and the commercial success led to the release of three more Presley film vehicles over the next twenty months; Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, and King Creole. Jailhouse Rock and King Creole (1958), called for relatively dramatic performances. The erotic dance sequence to the [15] former's title song is often cited as his greatest moment on screen. It was choreographed by [16] 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! [17] Elvis Presley can act."

1960S
His first film after his return from the Army, G.I. Blues (1960), directed by Norman Taurog, set the tone for Presley's Hollywood output in the 1960s. Presley fans loved the mix of songs, romance and humor, and, perhaps surprisingly considering his experiences during the 1950s, critics were [18] also warming to the new formulaic approach and clean-cut characters. Presley was not so thrilled, and thought many of the songs in G.I. Blues made no sense to the plot. He was concerned about the number of songs in it; unlike his earlier films, which consisted of fewer songs usually resulting in only an EP release, G.I. Blues had enough to release a full LP in its own right. 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[19] 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 [20] movies", and a genre unto themselves. The majority of Presley's movies aimed for little more than reliable returns on modest investments and the promotion of their accompanying soundtrack [21] albums. To maintain box office success, he would later even shift "into beefcake formula [22] comedy mode for a few years." For most of the 1960s, during which he made 27 movies, there [23] were few exceptions, such as the non-musical western, Charro! Presley's movies were generally poorly receivedone critic dismissed them as a "pantheon of [24] [25] 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 [26] [27] 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 [28] 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[29] made surrealism." Hal Wallis 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 [30] 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 [31] to let him develop into a serious actor. Critics maintained that "No major star suffered through [32] 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, [33] but he didn't." Wallis defended his actions decades later, telling critics, "Elvis was a great entertainer, a great personality. . .and that is what we bought when we bought him. The idea of tailoring Elvis for dramatic roles is something that we never attempted because we did not sign [34] Elvis as a second Jimmy Dean. We signed him as a number one Elvis Presley." For all that, Presley's films were indeed commercially successful, and he "became a film genre of [35] 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 likeBlue 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." David Winters of "West Side Story" fame worked with Presley as a choreographer on four of his [36] movies Viva Las Vegas, Tickle Me, Easy Come, Easy Go and Girl Happy.. Ann-Margret, who co-starred in Viva Las Vegas with Presley, introduced him to Winters, and recommended Winters as the film's choreographer, Winters' first feature film choreography job. Ann-Margret was Winters' dance student at the time. The dynamic combination of Presley, Ann-Margret and Winters' choreography helped make Viva Las Vegas Presley's most successful film at the box office, returning more than $5 million to MGM, more than double the average gross on most other Presley movies of that decade. Winters also convinced the studios to let him use his own dancers in Presley's movies, most of whom were also Winters' dance students, including Teri Garr, who later received an Academy Award nomination for Tootsie. Garr, who was brought in by Winters to [37][38][39][40] dance in Viva Las Vegas, appeared in eight other Presley films. 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 [41] 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 [42] automaton on film?" Change of Habit (1969) was Presley's final non-concert movie. His films were no longer profitable, for by the late 1960s the Hippie movement had developed and musical acts like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan,Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Grateful [43] Dead, The Doors and Janis Joplin were dominating the airwaves. Therefore, Presley shifted his career back to recording and touring after these pictures. The highlights of this period include the television specials, '68 Comeback Special and Aloha From Hawaii.

1970S
Presley's last two theatrical films were concert documentaries in the early 1970s. 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 [44] financial demands. Joe Esposito also recalls that Presley was unsure about the project himself [45] because he did not want to play a loser. 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).