Reeling Backward: "King Creole" (1958)

Elvis Presley was not much of an actor, and I've not been much of a fan of his movie work.

I've actually only seen some of the hokier stuff from the '60s, "Viva Las Vegas" and such, which was rapidly-produced pop junk built around Presley's rock 'n' roll persona. "Girls, fast cars and some tunes" was the credo. It was less filmmaking than "marketing synergy" before they had a name for that, his movies bolstering his singing career and vice-versa, keeping him top-of-the-bill status even as the longhairs passed him by musically.

I am astonished to learn Elvis starred in 31 films between 1956 and 1969, including two a year between 1960-63 and three a year after that until hanging it up at the ripe old age of 34.

Presley often cited "King Creole" as his personal favorite role, and I'm inclined to agree.

I think it's one of his best because it wasn't conceived as a "Hey, let's make an Elvis movie" project. Having a legendary director like Michael Curtiz ("Casablanca") at the helm doesn't hurt, either. It was shot on an incredibly fast schedule (even by Elvis standards) of just seven weeks, owing to the fact Presley received his draft notice and got a 60-day deferment from the Army to complete the picture.

Based on a novel by Harold Robbins about a teenage boxing sensation pressured by the mob, the movie was actually developed for James Dean before he was killed in 1955. They switched the setting from New York to New Orleans and boxing to singing, and Curtiz insisted upon shooting in black-and-white with a heavy film noir shading, courtesy of cinematographer Russell Harlan ("Blackboard Jungle"), six times an Oscar nominee without winning.

The screen adaptation was by Herbert Baker, who'd worked on a previous Elvis picture, "Loving You," and Michael V. Gazzo, completing his second and last feature film script before moving on to a second career as an actor including playing frickin' Frankie "Five Angels" Pentangeli himself in "The Godfather Part II," and how the crap did I not know that already?

Shades of Ruth Gordon...

The story setup is a classic "boy from nothing hits the big time and is tempted by corruption of the soul" tale. Danny Fisher is a high-school dropout working as a busboy in one of the Bourbon Street saloons owned by local big man Maxie Fields, who he's never even met. On a dare he gets on stage and belts one out, becoming an overnight singing sensation.

He has daddy issues, vowing never to be a meek sheep like his old man, and is balancing romances between a nice girl and a gun moll. Danny gets squeezed hard by the crimelord and his thugs and is forced into bad choices he'll soon regret.

The supporting cast is simply delish. Maxie is played by Walter Matthau, growly and commanding. Carolyn Jones has a pathetic but alluring pull as Ronnie, Maxie's wastrel mistress/pawn. Dean Jagger, often a cowboy or soldier, plays Danny's pathetic dad, a widower pharmacist who can't keep a job. Vic Morrow, one of those actors you think couldn't possibly have ever been young, has sly charm as Shark, the hoodlum whose blond pompadour is nearly as impressive as Elvis' jet black one.

(Interesting aside: Elvis had naturally sandy blond hair, dying it with shoe polish before getting famous enough for professional color jobs. As the self-appointed Grand Vizier of Cinematic Blondness, I hereby claim Presley for our team.)

Dolores Hart, who also played an Elvis love interest in "Loving You," her film debut, is Nellie, the virginal five-and-dime shopgirl Danny falls for in between being tempted by the older, worldier (read: easy) Ronnie. Hart was pegged as the next Grace Kelly, making 10 pictures in five years before shocking Hollywood by abruptly quitting acting just as Kelly did, only in her case to become a nun instead of a princess.

(More interesting asides: the story of Hart's life was told in the 2011 documentary short, "God Is the Bigger Elvis," which got an Oscar nomination. She attended the 2012 Academy Awards ceremony in full black-and-white habit; the last time she had strolled that red carpet was in 1959.)

Other cast members include Jan Shepard as Danny's long-suffering older sister, Mimi, forced to take on the role of mother after their own passed away. She later falls for Charlie LeGrand, the twice-her-age owner of the titular club played by Paul Stewart. Charlie is pretty much the only guy in Nawlins not under Maxie's thumb, and sees Danny as a way to rejuvenate the failing King Creole.

The movie falls into a pretty steady rhythm of one song every 12 to 15 minutes or so, so there's a pretty decent collection of soundtrack tunes. None of them really stood out to me, though "Hard Headed Woman" hit the top of the charts. Performing as Danny, Elvis does a somewhat understated version of his singular stage routine, a little bit of shakin' but not any egregious pelvis-ing.

I was interested that Danny starts out being backed by bands comprised mostly of African-American jazz musicians, but by the time he's ensconced as the main attraction at the King Creole they've all mysteriously turned white. Perhaps some additional credence for charges of cultural appropriation by rockers, laid out starkly onscreen.

Danny's dynamic with women is... a bit disturbing. On his first date with Nellie, he fools her into thinking he's taking her to a party, when really it's a ruse to get her alone in a seedy hotel room and pressure her into sex. Weirdly, despite seeing right through the ploy she tells him she's still willing to go along, so ensorceled is she by his hunka-hunka burnin' love vibe.

It seems clear they're both virgins, and Danny quickly apologizes for trying to act like the street rat everyone treats him as. From there they have a pretty typical chaste screen romance.

I should mention Nellie first met him when Danny and Shark worked in cahoots to rob her store. They run a couple of jobs together, first on their own then later at Maxie's behest. The latter includes walloping Danny's dad while taking the deposit to the bank, initially thinking it was his father's overbearing boss at the pharmacy. This requires an expensive brain surgery, which Maxie pays for, putting Danny further under his screw.

If the pairing with Nellie is uncomfortable, the one with Ronnie is positively loathsome. She's probably only a few years older but seems worn down as if by decades of abuse, burying herself in drink and self-loathing. She wears an old-school Louise Brooks bob hairstyle, with big pleading eyes and a cynically turned mouth.

Technically she's Maxie's girlfriend, but men like him have little use for women beyond sex, so he's happy to loan her out to his friends or use Ronnie as bait for dumb fish like Danny. They share an early flirtation where he rescues her from some drunks and she makes a pass at him -- while dropping him off at his high school! -- and Maxie, recognizing the attraction, uses her to manipulate Danny.

She's not an innocent by any stretch. In one scene where Danny is forcibly brought to Maxie's place for a meeting, it's clearly a set-up to get him to sleep with Ronnie. She tells him this outright, but uses her victimhood as a weapon, pleading with Danny to stay a few hours to prevent punishment from Maxie.

Ronnie saves Danny's bacon in the end after he's hunted and stabbed by Shark and the rest of Maxie's thugs, driving him to a beach house getaway to get bandaged up and consummate their love without the taint of the city. Of course, the place belongs to Maxie, so he soon shows up for revenge, accidentally shooting Ronnie so she can die in Danny's arms and free him up to return to Nellie.

Elvis did not have the most expressive face in the world, and I noticed that virtually every actor in the movie gets plenty of close-ups from Curtiz other than the star of the show. Still, he's able to put some genuine emotion into his voice and body language that makes us feel for Danny.

I was quite taken with the gloomy sense of doom that feels woven into the very DNA of "King Creole." If it had been made a few years later I think Danny would've been more of an antihero character who winds up perishing in the end, a lesson about the consequence of giving into temptation.

But for an Elvis movie that's only partially an "Elvis movie," "King Creole" stands up well to the test of time. Put it this way: I think it'd be a very watchable picture even if it didn't feature him.

Reeling Backward: "The Kentuckian" (1955)

Usually when a movie star gets big enough to be in charge of their own films, the resulting pictures tend to be vehicles for them to portray larger-than-life heroes who bestride the globe like a colossus.

So it's interesting that in "The Kentuckian," the first of only two movies he ever directed, Burt Lancaster plays an unsophisticated common man who frequently finds himself the brunt of ridicule and misfortune -- losing the skin off his back, both figuratively and quite literally.

He plays "Big Elias" Wakefield, a rustic son of the Kentucky hills who is on the run -- though he eschews those words -- with his son of about 10 years, Little Eli (Donald MacDonald, who had a short run as a child actor with just three years of credited roles). It seems the Wakefields and the Fromes are the Hatfield and McCoys of the Bluegrass State, carrying on a war of dark deeds so long and bloody, the enmity has engendered its own bit of well-known verse.

Though it's never directly stated, it appears Elias killed a Frome in some sort of dispute, and lit out for Texas to escape his troubles and find some elbow room. An apparent widow (again, we're left to surmise), Elias is an expert hunter and tracker who has little ken when it comes to city life -- which, in 1820s Kentucky, means any collection of shanties where more than a dozen people congregate.

His true home is in the woods, his faithful hunting dog Pharaoh chasing after foxes, their meals whatever game they can catch or shoot, and their bed made by shuffling together a pile of leaves. Lancaster's wide face beams with smiling pride in the outdoor scenes, while a stoic frown overtakes him when they must go into town for supplies or whatnot.

Elias carries the Gideon Horn -- which is also the title of the novel by Felix Holt upon which A.B. Guthrie Jr. based the script -- a massive bone hunting horn that he uses to call Pharaoh back from the chase. Little Eli often bears the horn for him, a totem of their untamed heritage, and tries unsuccessfully to blow out a note himself. When he's finally able to, that means he's become a man, Elias says.

Troubles befall them in myriad form. Elias has the princely sum of $235 saved for their trip, mostly to pay for the ferry ride down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and the ship to Texas. But in town he runs afoul of the local sheriff, who sicced his dog on Pharaoh and didn't like when it lost the fight.

Thrown in jail for resisting when the constable made to shoot his dog, Elias is helped escape by Hannah (Dianne Foster), a local "bought" woman -- aka an indentured servant -- who works for the pub owner in virtual slavery. Little Eli insists she come along with them to Texas, and it seems a nice little domestic group has formed.

But the sheriff and bartender catch up with them (too much sleeping in the leaves, I guess) and demand all their money in bribe to let them go.

Elias had hoped to stop off to visit his older brother, Zack (John McIntire) and his wife, Sophie (Una Merkel), in the riverside village of Humility. But the lack of funds forces them to hole up there for a few months so they can work up a grubstake. Zack's stated intention is to tame Elias and turn him into a businessman like himself, running a trade depot that deals in tobacco, furs, etc.

Sophie takes an instant dislike to Hannah, seeing the lines of affection forming between her and Elias, deeming a "bought girl" as socially unfit to join the family. Hannah takes up working at the local bar run by Stan Bodine, the resident dandy/bully played by Walter Matthau. He has his eyes set on the schoolmarm, Susie Spann (Diana Lynn), so when she takes a shine to Elias that sets up the inevitable conflict between the two men.

Things do not go well for big and little Eli in Humility. The latter can't abide being cooped up inside a schoolhouse all day long when there's sunshine, trees and a great river to enjoy. Elias even lets Aunt Sophie tie up Pharaoh, which breaks both the boy's heart and the dog's spirit.

Elias is mocked by the townsfolk for his buckskin clothes and quaint ways. The derision grows to a fever pitch when he finds a huge pearl while harvesting river oysters. He consults a traveling salesman, Ziby Fletcher (John Carradine), impressed by the man's eloquent speechifyin'. Elias is cagey enough to know the (almost literal) snake oil shyster is a fraud, but figures someone that learned can clue him in where to get a good price on the pearl. Little does he know freshwater pearls are worthless compared to the saltwater kind.

Seeing a chance to secure his place in town by kowtowing to Bodine, Fletcher makes up a story about former President James Monroe being the biggest collector of river pearls in the land. Elias writes a letter to the ex0president, paying four bits in postage. The ruse sprung, the menfolk all enjoy a good laugh at Elias, while little Eli endures taunts by schoolchildren: "Your pa is President Pearl!"

Undoubtedly the most famous scene in the movie is the showdown between Elias and Bodine. It's initiated when Bodine sends his son to pick a fight with little Eli -- much the same way that sheriff sent his dog after Elias' -- and the boy is bloodied by a makeshift whip of rope. The boys are separated and the fathers take up their places, with Bodine wielding a real whip against the unarmed Elias, who is soon cut to pieces. He finally prevails, but only when Hannah surreptitiously intervenes to trap Bodine's whip under her wagon wheel.

I also enjoyed a jaunty little gambling scene aboard the steamboat Gordon C. Greene -- the same one used in "Gone With the Wind." Elias makes a show of his big bag of gold (actually Zack's money) to pass himself off as a rube, conning the con men by placing some smaller bets in conjunction with the experienced gambler demonstrating the game of roulette.

The idea is to lure in the sucker by showing him how easy it is to win, but Elias knows the game is rigged and he will win as long as he mirrors the other man's bets. After winning $280, he, little Eli and Pharaoh are then chased around the ship by the gamblers, who instruct the pilot not to stop at Humility, so they're forced to jump for it and swim to shore.

The proprietor of the steamboat -- though not involved with the gamblers -- is Pleasant Tuesday Babson (John Litel), a colorful figure who's recruiting pioneers to help settle Texas. He takes an instant liking to Elias, seeing him as the perfect specimen for wide open lands. However, by this time Zack and Susie have gotten their claws into him, and Elias is determined to stay.

The story wraps, not entirely convincingly, with the arrival of two Fromes brothers to claim their revenge. Played without credit by Paul Wexler and Douglas Spencer, these are twin, grim specters, so lean and hollow-eyed they appear to have set aside all nutrition in their crusade. After the obligatory shoot-out, in which both Bodine and Babson are collateral casualties and Hannah against saves Elias' bacon, Hannah, Elias and Eli resolve on the spot to unite into a family.

It brings the film to an abrupt end, without even so much as a final pull-out shot of the trio riding the steamboat south toward their fate.
 
As a director, Lancaster gets lively, authentic performances out of his cast. He seems to have largely left the camera work to veteran cinematographer Ernest Laszlo, resulting in some picturesque scenes of the countryside and river. The film was shot almost entirely on location in Kentucky, and it shows.

"The Kentuckian" is a very atypical adventure story for its time. Elias Wakefield is an ordinary man who carries a rifle, but never even fires it once in the course of the picture. He largely looks to avoid conflict, and when he does resort to battles of fists or wits, he always comes up on the losing side -- or would, if it weren't for help from Hannah.
 
It would be interesting to see this film remade from her point of view. She's actually the one who makes everything good happen for Elias, and in that sense Hannah is the truest Kentuckian.

Reeling Backward: "Charade" (1963)

"Charade" has sometimes been described as "the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock didn't direct," but I'm not sure if that's really fair. Hitch often included bits of puckish and morbid humor in his films, but when it came time for scaring people, he was deadly serious about his craft.

This 1963 romantic thriller, by contrast, is fizzy and fun. Though there are a few moments where Audrey Hepburn, as wan heroine Regina Lampert, aka "Reggie," is imperiled, they are fleeting and frightening only in that sort of way you know everything is going to be alright. After all, she's the star of the picture, and if anything really dire happened to her, the show would be over.

When I say Hepburn is the star, I mean truly that: she far outshines co-star Carey Grant, but she's meant to. He is the moon who basks in her reflected light; he reacts to her rather than the other way around. Romantically, she is clearly the pursuer and he the pursued prey, wielding the shield of propriety to fend off her advances: 'Come into your room? Alone? At this time of night? Heavens!'

In this way director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone essentially made a proto-feminist feature film. In some sense Hollywood has backpedaled since then -- nowadays it's almost unthinkable to have a star of Grant's stature in a movie in which he plays second fiddle to an actress.

The basic plot is that she's a widow whose husband was murdered, and now three strangers are chasing her around Paris, claiming she has $250,000 that belongs to them. (That's about $2 million in today's dollars.) Grant shows up as Peter Joshua, a dashing stranger who gets embroiled in the intrigue. She falls for him hard, even when it turns out he's in cahoots with the criminals... sort of. It gets more complicated from there.

The film has an interesting progeny and legacy. Stone and Marc Behm wrote the spec screenplay, but no studio was interested. So Stone turned it into a book, and suddenly everyone in Hollywood wanted it. Thus he turned it back into a screenplay. (Behm got a story credit.)

When they released the film, Universal Pictures improperly copyrighted the movie, so "Charade" became part of the public domain immediately. The fact that anyone could release their own version of it on video, or play it on television, probably helped the film remain popular over the years. It didn't even get an "official" video release by Universal until the awful, unnecessary remake starring Mark Whalberg came out in 2002, when the original was tacked on to the DVD as a bonus feature.

There was also a brouhaha over Hepburn's utterance of the word "assassinated," which was changed to "eliminated" in the wake of JFK's murder.

The movie is a total lark, more comedy than anything else. But I adored the cartoonish villains, the Parisian locales and the genuine romantic chemistry between Hepburn and Grant.

"Do you know what's wrong with you?" she asks as they part at the end of their night. "No, what?" he responds, setting up endless possibilities of Hollywood riffs. Instead, she looks at him pensively and exhales, "...nothing!" A beautiful line, and again usually the sort of thing the guy says to the dame, not vice-versa.

Grant was 59 when the movie was made to Hepburn's 33, though as I've noted before he seemed to stop aging at 38, looking much the same until he was deep into his 60s. Still, he felt self-conscious about the age difference and had the filmmakers add in several self-deprecating references by his character.

Unlike most older stars who fade away or segue into crotchety grampa roles, Grant had a daughter, his only child, at the age of 62 and decided to retire from acting to become a full-time daddy. Apparently he was just as magical in his final role as all his onscreen ones; Jennifer Grant wrote a loving tribute.

The bad guys are:

• James Coburn as Tex, a tall, preening showboat with a Southern drawl and a mean disposition.
• George Kennedy as Scobie, who's even bigger and even meaner than Tex, plus he has hook/weapon prosthetic hand.
• Ned Glass as Neopold Gideon, an older intellectual type, a turncoat who tends to have sneezing fits when he's nervous or endangered.
• Walter Matthau as Hamilton Bartholomew, a shady CIA man who claims to be helping out Reggie but is actually after the money himself. I'm not really giving anything away here, since Matthau practically smokes with suspicion from his very first scene. Not to mention, despite ostensibly being the Paris bureau chief of a federal government division, he's never able to muster up any actual resources to assist her.

The trio of chase men are introduced in a terrific scene: they each show up to Reggie's husband's funeral, and make close inspections of the body to ensure he's really dead. Scobie even sticks a pin in it -- literally.

In another rarity of mainstream Hollywood films, it's actually Tex, rather than Peter or Reggie, who has a flash of insight and figures out what her husband did with the money.  

But then the bad guys start showing up dead one by one, so suspicion falls on Peter, whose real name turns out to be Alex Dyle... or is it Adam Canfield ... or maybe Brian Cruikshank. One of the cleverest lines of dialogue is the very end, when Reggie and ... her man have gotten engaged, and she proposes they have lots of boys, "so we can name them all after you."

"Charade" also marked the first collaboration between Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, earning an Oscar nomination for original song.

Part screwball comedy, part spy thriller, and a whole lot romantic, "Charade" is what nowadays we would call the perfect date movie. A lot of these movies are forgettable, but not this one.

Reeling Backward: "The Sunshine Boys" (1975)

The biggest joke in "The Sunshine Boys" is that the two old vaudevillians are funnier when they're not telling jokes.

The set-up of the 1975 comedy, based on the Neil Simon play, is about the duo of Lewis & Clark, hysterically funny on stage, and horribly estranged off it. They're brought back together by an offer to do their act one more time for a big television special, if they can only stand to be in the same room.

The highlight is supposed to be when they do their old doctor sketch during rehearsals, which is the least funny time we see them together. They're still pretty damn funny, but after an hour or so of wisecracks and great comic timing, we long for them to get to arguing again.

Simon's play was a big hit on Broadway a few years earlier, so it only made sense for it to follow "The Odd Couple" from stage to screen. Jack Benny and Red Skelton were set to star, but Benny grew sick and died and Skelton pulled out. Walter Mattheu stepped in as irascible Willy Clark, and George Burns -- a real vaudeville straight man -- was brought in to tackle the role of Al Lewis.

This was Burns' first motion picture in 36 years, and it was a doozy. He won the Oscar for best supporting actor at age 80, prompting him to joke that he should only do one movie every 36 years. Offers soon came flooding in, and 60-odd years into his career Burns became a movie star with the "Oh, God" films and several others.

Lewis and Clark hate each other, though neither would give the other the satisfaction of saying so. It's more a long, cold war, with every interaction a game of one-upsmanship. Even after Clark suffers a heart attack and is bedridden, he makes a point of setting up his chair on the far side of the room to receive Lewis, and stuffs pillows beneath himself, so his old partner will have to walk as far as possible to see him, and look up when doing so.

Richard Benjamin plays Ben, Clark's hapless nephew and agent, who can't convince his uncle to show up on time and in the right place to audition for a potato chip commercial. A number of other notable actors turn in supporting roles, including a young F. Murray Abraham -- all that hair! -- as a mechanic.

Matthau was only in his 50s when they made the movie, but he was believably aged up 20 years or so through makeup and his own acting skills.

What's really funny is that the comedy duo's disagreements are so trivial. Clark insists that Lewis deliberately poked him during their performances, and spit on him when pronouncing his T's. Lewis wanted to retire and Clark didn't, and he's obviously bothered that he doesn't have any identity outside of their partnership. Lewis gets steamed when Clark changes the opening line of their routine from "Come in" to "Enter."

There's a great, serious scene where Clark is haranguing Lewis to Ben, who finally asks him why he worked with him for 43 years if he hated him so much. Clark forcefully calls Lewis "the best." He was a great actor with terrific comic timing, Clark praises. "As an act, nobody could touch him. As a human being, nobody wanted to touch him!"

The jokes come fast and furious, building in speed and intensity until the audience is rolling with laughter. It's not vaudeville, but it sure is funny.

3 stars



(Apologies... after all my talk about how the vaudeville routine wasn't as funny as the rest of the movie, that's the only video clip I could find.)