The Movie Debut of Elvis Presley - "Love Me Tender"

[luisam]

“LOVE ME TENDER” – ELVIS PRESLEY’S MOVIE DEBUT

 

I had problems with my cable TV so while was looking for something to watch on YouTube,  I came upon this movie and made some queries about it, with some interesting results. "Love Me Tender" was the movie debut of Elvis Presley, released on November 15, 1956.

The film is set in Texas after the U.S. Civil War and Elvis plays Clint Reno, the brother of a former Confederate soldier.  It looks really strange that they made a period movie with the most popular rock and roll star of the era playing a historical figure. It does not look a good idea but somehow it worked!

Presley had shown always interest in becoming an actor and even insisted that he would not like to sing in any of his movies because he wished to be taken seriously as a film star. In March 1956, he screen-tested successfully for Hal Wallis and soon he was contracted for one movie with option for six more and the promise that he would get dramatic roles to let the singer take his acting career seriously. The contract also stipulated that Presley was free to make at least one picture a year for other studios. Wallis had the idea to pair Presley with Jerry Lewis who had just separated from his comedy partner Dean Martin after a successful run of seventeen movies together, but the idea was shelved.

Finally, Wallis being unable to find a project "good enough for the debut of Elvis Presley", he was loaned out to 20th Century Fox and began work on a western to be titled "The Reno Brothers". Originally Presley's part was small and it had been turned down by both Jeffrey Hunter and Robert Wagner, but then the role was expanded to take advantage of Presley's popularity including some musical numbers; so Elvis sang “Love Me Tender” in the movie, along with three other songs.

Presley started his music career with Sun Records in 1954, and then his first album for RCA was released in March 1956. At the time of the release of Love Me Tender, Presley had only been recording music for a few years.  

When Presley appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show during a break in filming the movie, on September 9, he performed "Love Me Tender" for the first time. Two weeks later RCA confirmed that advanced sales of the single had resulted in it going gold months before the movie being released — an industry first! So, after advance sales of the single “Love Me Tender” went through the roof, the movie was renamed after the song.

The film was similar to Elvis’s later films in that it combined a story with Elvis singing. But it differed from many of his later films in that he did not play the lead role in Love Me Tender.  Additionally, Presley’s character died at the end, which would have been unthinkable in his later movies. Test screenings of the film resulted in people being upset at the death of Presley's character. Attempting to reach a compromise between the death and pleasing his fans, Presley filmed an extra scene and recorded an extra verse to the title track to be played over the end credits.

When Presley attended a private screening of the film on November 20 with his mother, Gladys, she started to cry at the death of her son's character at the end, leading Presley to insist that his characters would never die on screen again.

In his book Me And A Guy Named Elvis, Jerry Schilling recounts the atmosphere inside Loew's State Theater in Memphis during the premiere screening:

"The screams of the girls around me made it just about impossible to follow the story—this was the first time I'd seen an audience treat a film like it was a live concert, loudly responding to every move made and word uttered by their favorite star."

Presley would later tell his friend Cliff Gleaves that he found this type of reaction from his cinema-going fans embarrassing, and that it had prevented him from being accepted as a serious actor.

You may watch the entire Love Me Tender below.
 

 

 

 

[funkyy]

He was actually a potentially very good actor, he just wasn't given the chance due to him being treated as a money making "commodity" by the studios and his manager Colonel Parker. He gave glimpses in some of his movies of how good an actor he could have been, but he was contracted to appear in many embarrassing movies that were guaranteed box office hits just by having his name on the billboard. When I was a kid women wanted to have Elvis and men wanted to be Elvis..he was a phenomenon and rightly remembered in popular music as "The King".