King Creole (1958)
Movie rating: 8/10
Unlike most of Elvis Presley’s filmography, which by the 1960s had devolved into a series of interchangeable musical comedies, King Creole feels like a real movie. It’s also widely recognized as the King’s best film.
Loosely based on the novel A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins, King Creole is directed by Michael Curtiz, a filmmaker responsible for numerous classics, having won the Academy Award for Best Director for a little film called Casablanca. Curtiz surrounds Elvis with a top-flight supporting cast and gives the film an atmospheric ambience that at times recalls film noir. The screenplay by Herbert Baker and Michael V. Gazzo is full of genuinely great lines, dramatic moments, and well-developed characters. The soundtrack is one of Presley’s best, giving him plenty of material to sink his teeth into.
More than anything, King Creole allows Elvis to truly flex his muscles as an actor. His dramatic performance here is a revelation, showing what he could have achieved if Hollywood had not reduced him to a mere commodity — and if Elvis himself had had the courage to stand up for his own artistic ambitions to be a “proper actor” which, as he later told Elsa Lanchester on the set of Easy Come, Easy Go, he once dreamed of being.
In contrast to later Presley travelogues — even the best of which, like Blue Hawaii and Viva Las Vegas, are almost shockingly inconsequential in their plots — King Creole has plenty of plot to go around. The star plays Danny Fisher, a 19-year-old struggling to support his sister Mimi (Jan Shepard) and unemployed father (Dean Jagger) by working tables at New Orleans nightclubs. His work responsibilities, combined with something of an “attitude”, have led to repeated failures to graduate high school. Danny, you may not be surprised to learn, is also a singer who finds success performing at clubs on Bourbon Street. Gangster Maxie Fields (Walter Matthau) tries to hire Danny to sing at his own clubs, backed by the threat of violence in the form of lead thug Shark (Vic Morrow). Meanwhile, Danny finds himself caught between two women: Maxie’s moll Ronnie (Carolyn Jones) and the virginal Nellie (Dolores Hart).
Ironically, considering how different it is from Presley’s 1960s star vehicles, King Creole is something of a “travelogue” in itself. The New Orleans setting pervades the film: from Danny’s impoverished home in the French Quarter to the clubs on Bourbon Street, from steamboat rides to a house on the bayou. The difference here is that New Orleans is not presented as some idyllic paradise like, say, Hawaii in three different Presley films. We see poverty and crime, run-down neighbourhoods and dark alleys. But that also gives New Orleans more character and verisimilitude. It feels less like a tourism ad and more like a real place, which makes the cultural allure of the city come through all the more strongly. I’ll have to travel there someday.
Unlike most Elvis films, Presley plays more of an actual character. Of course, there are still obvious similarities to the man himself, most obviously his rise as a popular singer. A reference to Danny’s dead mother feels uncomfortably prescient, in light of the death of Elvis’s own mother Gladys little more than a month after King Creole’s release. But we nevertheless feel drawn into Danny’s particular struggles in school, his conflicts with his father, and the growing pressure he comes under from Maxie Fields — who wishes to own and control Danny the same way he does everything else, from Ronnie to most of the area clubs.
Elvis’s natural charisma and talent are refined here with a subtle performance that runs the emotional gamut from grief and heartbreak to the pure joy he feels performing onstage. He’s just as magnetic when he’s not singing as when he is, and gets plenty of moments to shine. One of my favourites is when Elvis sings “Steadfast, Loyal and True” to placate a gangster, Ralph, who is abusing Ronnie. After Ralph asks for an encore, Danny wields a broken bottle to protect Ronnie as she leaves, adding: “Now you know what I do for an encore.”
Maxie Fields (Walter Matthau) is a controlling gangster in an abusive The supporting cast also gets much more to work with than later Elvis films. Jones conveys the dashed hopes of Ronnie, who also once held ambitious to be a singer, and her desperation to escape from the clutches of Fields. Matthau is a great villain, full of cool, arrogant menace. Hart’s fresh-faced innocence brings inner conflict to her feelings for Danny — whom she meets when he sings in the five-and-dime she works at as a distraction while gang members rob the store. On their first date Danny brings Nellie to a sleazy hotel room, which she balks at. The virgin/whore dichotomy is at play here in the distinction between “good girl” Nellie and “bad girl” Ronnie. At the same time the movie is much more sympathetic to Ronnie than that archetype might suggest. Her plight makes for some genuinely emotional moments.
The music is terrific, some of the best in any Elvis movie, and his performances make for some of the singer’s greatest moments on celluloid. My favourite is the opening number, “Crawfish”, which Elvis sings as a duet with Kitty White in a way that immediately immerses the viewer in the New Orleans setting. Elvis’s performance of “Trouble” and the title track, both compositions by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — who wrote some of Elvis’s greatest songs — are legendary. Even the “lesser” songs are great, bringing a bayou flavour with the likes of “Dixieland Rock”. The ballad “As Long As I Have You” is also a highlight in the emotional context when Elvis sings it. I was surprised we don’t see him actually perform “Hard Headed Woman”, one of his most wicked rockers, which topped the Billboard charts. Through it all, Elvis displays his innate presence and talent in a way that ranks right up there with Jailhouse Rock as his greatest screen performance (note: I still haven’t seen Flaming Star).
The abundance of melodramatic plot developments gets a bit out of hand in the second half of the movie, particularly near the end, when it feels like certain elements are resolved too quickly. But overall this is a compelling narrative that represents one of the highlights of Elvis’s screen career. Overall I’d say it’s objectively better than Jailhouse Rock, even if I still prefer that movie for nostalgic and sentimental reasons.
Before Hollywood turned Elvis into a bland family entertainer and sanded all the rough edges off, King Creole showed what a great movie Presley was capable of when surrounded by the right talent, given the right screenplay, and a chance to be a “proper actor” in addition to singer and musician.
