King Creole (1958)

Director: Michael Curtiz                                 Writers: Herbert Baker & Michael V. Gazzo
Film Score: Walter Scharf                              Cinematography: Russell Harlan
Starring: Elvis Presley, Carolyn Jones, Walter Matthau and Dolores Hart

The great Michael Curtiz directing an Elvis movie? Rather than looking at it as a step down, I think it just goes to show his tremendous versatility. I would also go so far as to say that it was because of Curtiz that King Creole was Elvis’s best film to date, and easily his best film ever. While the songs are certainly not as good as Lieber and Stoller’s numbers for Jailhouse Rock, the film as a whole is much improved because it was based on the novel A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins rather than written for the singer. Unlike most Elvis films, it’s an actual dramatic piece that would have been interesting even without Elvis. And that’s not just due to the story but also a first-class director.

Elvis plays Danny Fisher, a high school drop out who has a good heart. On his last day of school he gets kicked out for defending the honor of a prostitute. But his mother has died and his father can’t get work. He plays the angry young man in this film, but unlike the despicable character from Jailhouse Rock, he has legitimate reasons here. When he’s kicked out of school for the second year in a row he falls in with a gang led by Vic Morrow who are committing petty crimes. At night Elvis works in a club as busboy and cleans up in the morning. Walter Matthau plays the owner of the club, as well as prostitute Carolyn Jones. The main plot is a love triangle between Elvis, Jones and the good girl, Dolores Hart.

Rather than the misogynist that he plays in Jailhouse Rock, Elvis is a typical teenager in the film, torn between the knowing confidence of Jones and the attractive purity of Hart. At the same time he is attempting to rise above the perceived failure of his father, Dean Jagger. He begins working for the owner of the King Creole, the only club on Bourbon Street that isn’t owned by Matthau. But the mob boss isn’t willing to let Elvis go and Elvis makes some poor choices that keep them entwined, much to Elvis’s disgust. As an Elvis film, the first half is what one would expect, but Curtiz turns the second half of the film into something very noirish. While the film doesn’t have a great script, it has great production values, a more believable performance of the songs in the context of the film, and a great cinematic ending.

In The B List essay by Gerald Peary he accurately assesses the film as a decent piece of cinema and the best Elvis film, for many of the reasons I’ve stated above: source material by Harold Robbins, direction by Michael Curtiz, and that by having a few films under his belt it gave Elvis a bit more confidence while retaining his appealing rawness. There’s still the problem with the virginal Hart who practically begs him to deflower her, but that’s probably the only part of the film that rings false. The irony is that because of the improved cinematic qualities of the film it did poorly at the box office in comparison to the more frothy pictures that fans preferred. King Creole is a rare thing: a good Elvis movie. And while the ambivalent ending may have failed to satisfy fans, it’s a pretty nice little film for cinefiles.