JAILHOUSE ROCK (1957) B/W widescreen 96m dir: Richard Thorpe

w/Elvis Presley, Judy Tyler, Mickey Shaughnessy, Vaughn Taylor, Jennifer Holden, Dean Jones, Anne Neyland, Norm Johnson, Hugh Sanders, Mike Stoller, Grandon Rhodes

From The Movie Guide: "All shook up and enjoyably bad, JAILHOUSE ROCK captures early Elvis in all his leg-quivering, nostril-flaring, lip-snarling teen idol glory.

"This hot black-and-white number was Elvis Presley's third (after LOVE ME TENDER and LOVING YOU) and set the standard for the rest of his movie outings --- too bad the others omitted the dangerous element of his character presented here. Elvis comes across like a white-trash musical genius version of James Dean, playing Vince Everett, a surly good ole boy who accidentally kills a man while defending a lady's honor ... in a bar. This heroism gets him sent up for manslaughter, sharing his prison cell with Hunk Houghton (Mickey Shaughnessy), an ex-singer who convinces him to perform in the slammer's convict show. After Vince is freed, he meets Peggy Van Alden (Judy Tyler), with whom he forms a record company, and in no time he is a national star on his way to Hollywood. Peggy, however, sees that Vince is turning into an egomaniac, and she can't stand it.

"There's little surprise but JAILHOUSE really rocks, establishing pre-Army Elvis, the rockabilly elemental force, when he was really something. The steamy songs are mostly by [Jerry] Lieber and Stoller; the latter can be seen as the pianist in the famous 'Jailhouse Rock' sequence (which the young King choreographed). The title song sold two million records within two weeks, and the picture, in turn, grossed several million, with Presley receiving 50 percent of the profits. Other tunes include 'Treat Me Nice,' 'Baby, I Don't Care' and 'Young and Beautiful.'"

From the Library of Congress website (www.loc.gov), this 2002 article about the film by Carrie Rickey:

"When the heavy-lidded Elvis Presley swaggered onto the screen in Jailhouse Rock (1957) his third picture, he shook the music and movie industries to their bedrock. Elvis quaked the landscape so profoundly that he was uplifted to their bedrock. Elvis quaked the landscape so profoundly that he was uplifted and crowned rock’s King, dethroning pop royalty Frank Sinatra, who himself had dethroned Bing Crosby a decade earlier.

"Understand that Elvis was not the first rock-film star. That had been another hillbilly with a beat: Bill Haley, frontman of Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don't Knock the Rock (1957). A cheery apostle of the new sound, Haley possessed a doughy sex appeal but lacked the rebel shadings, contour, an attitude that made Elvis first a Goliath-slayer and, soon after, King of Kings.

"At one matinee of Jailhouse Rock adults (namely, my parents) thought he resembled Michelangelo’s marbled David with a jet-black pompadour, suggestive lips and gyrating hips. Teenagers (namely, my sisters) thought he resembled James Dean with a guitar. Watching Jailhouse Rock in 2001 I would add that he furthermore resembled a surly choirboy who couldn’t suppress his orgasmic grunts. To tally the Elvis attributes is to realize how he was the fleshly embodiment of every imaginable contradiction of classicism and romanticism.

"In the Elvis canon, Jailhouse Rock is the origin story, explaining how he might have come by his snarling, surly attitude, and proceeding to rehabilitate him and repackage him for popular consumption. Heaven knows, Jailhouse Rock is not the best Elvis movie (that would probably be Flaming Star or Viva Las Vegas). And heaven knows, it’s not a particularly good movie. But Jailhouse Rock remains the most eloquent record of two seismic events that rocked 1950s America: The Rise of the Teenager and The Elvis Phenom.

"Elvis gave voice to that eternal teenage imperative, 'Treat Me Nice' (as he demands musically here). His very presence made him the link in the rebel chain that connects James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause to Warren Beatty in Splendor in the Grass to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever to Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall.

"When first we meet Elvis’s Vince Everett, he is riding a forklift on a construction site, smiling about payday, and joking that he plans to use his salary 'to buy a line of chorus girls and have ‘em dance on my bed.' Immediately he is established as a working-class kid (as opposed to the middle-class youth played by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause) who believes that money buys him sex. (He’s oblivious to the fact that women of all ages, and men too, are drawn to him as bees to nectar.)

"In a subsequent scene, he buys drinks for the house in a downscale tavern, attracting the attention of slatternly blonde whose (protector? pimp? boyfriend?) roughs her up. In defending her honor, Vince beats up the womanbeater and kills him, landing himself a jail sentence for involuntary manslaughter.

"In the slammer, Vince bunks with that slab of country ham Hunk Houghton (Mickey Shaughnessy), who’s so impressed with the way the kid strums a guitar that he offers to help him on the outside --- for a price. And when Vince gets sprung, he works Hunk’s connections and catches the ear of music huckster Peggy van Alden (Judy Tyler), who professes to be all business but excites Vince’s pleasure instincts.

"At a time when Brando astride a motorcycle and Dean behind the wheel of a hot rod were the dominant images of misunderstood youth, Jailhouse Rock framed the misunderstanding musically. When perky Peggy introduces Vince to her parents, both academics, their intellectual friends pontificate about jazz tonalities. Vince, who hears only rock’s primal rhythms, finds this beside the point.

"And at a time when teens --- that emerging demographic --- felt put upon, Jailhouse Rock framed the adult/teen struggle in power terms. Adults --- like the record exec who gives Vince’s song to a more established artist to record --- are the exploiters who take from the powerless and give to the powerful.

"It’s enough to justify Vince’s bad attitude. And when he hits it big, he hits back manhandling women and minions the way the judges and wardens and execs have manhandled him. In perhaps the most attenuated Act Three in movie history, he realizes the error of his ways. In a confrontation where his is physically struck, Vince controls his anger and does not strike back. Hey, even a teenage caveman can evolve.

"Cinematically, Jailhouse Rock is that curiosity, a widescreen Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical shot in black and white. Director Richard Thorpe, best known for costume musicals such as The Student Prince, exploits the panoramic formal only in one sequence, the title number. It features Vince --- now filming a TV variety show --- before a male chorus line of adoring inmates --- in prison uniform, snaking down a firepole. Even in 1957 this number was more Metro than Memphis, choreographed like the Gene Kelly spoof of The Wild One in Les Girls, rather than something a rock idol might have imagined. (In hindsight, it portends Elvis’s future Vegas productions.)

"As a seismic event, the reverberations from Jailhouse Rock are still being felt. For the Elvis who emerges in this movie modeled how teenagers might style defiance. And it showed their parents that a bad boy could be rehabbed into a good citizen."