King Creole – 4K

King Creole – 4K
1958 – 115 Min. – 1.78:1
Kino Lorber – 4K Blu-ray
Starring Elvis Presley, Carolyn Jones, Dolores Hart
Written by Herbert Baker, Michael V. Gazzo
Directed by Michael Curtiz

If you’ve never seen a movie or read a book, you might be surprised by the twists and turns of King Creole, a teenage soap opera starring the real King—to its credit the film displays considerably more gravitas than the hillbilly cat’s paid vacations like Blue Hawaii and Follow that Dream. Directed by another representative of show biz royalty, Michael Curtiz, the film’s opening scenes are reminiscent of Hollywood musicals of the director’s heyday; a street vendor wanders the rain-soaked streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter singing about their wares: “He’ll be sweeter than sugar when you take a bite.” The song and that lyric serve as an introduction to the star of the show who pokes his head out a window and sings along.

Elvis is Danny Fisher, a soon-to-be high school dropout. For moral (and immoral) support Danny has an angel on his right shoulder and a devil on the other. At times they are interchangeable; the angelic blonde is Dolores Hart who plays Nellie, a cashier stuck in a five and dime with no other dreams but to get out of there; Carolyn Jones is the dark-haired Ronnie, the reincarnation of a gangster’s moll in so many Warner Bros. films. To underline their ambiguity, good-girl Nellie is often seen in shadowy alleyways or shady hotels while Ronnie is resplendent in sunlight. Just as Danny finds split-level comfort in both Hart and Jones, so does the film, they balance the movie and bring out both sides of Presley’s personality, the baby-faced mama’s boy and the cocky roué looking for good rockin’ tonight.

Danny is trying to help his sister get out of their shabby apartment in the French Quarter (what would the rent be now?) while their self-loathing father, played by a meeker than meek Dean Jagger, tries to rehabilitate himself by sweeping floors at a pharmacy (his boss is played by the persnickety Gavin Gordon, who saw better days as Lord Byron in the prologue to The Bride of Frankenstein).

Jagger excels at guilt trips, nightly brow-beatings which do his son no good, and so, rather than finish high school, Danny gets mixed up with some penny-ante crooks; he sings while they steal. Nellie doesn’t squeal on her new crush while Ronnie, the bad penny girlfriend of mobster Walter Matthau, seems to have a stereotypical heart of gold and goes on her own crusade to set Danny straight.

It’s a fraught triangle but not in the acting department, Hart and Jones expertly play their parts; Hart’s unimpeachable sincerity (she entered the convent in the late 60s and remains an advocate for the arts) and Jones’ bad luck charisma are winning—their professionalism smoothes over the awkward moments in Presley’s performance—it was the inability to lose himself in a character that would mar all his films save for the concert documentaries. Jones in particular plays off her beatnik appeal and shows some of the sphinx-like sexiness that made her Morticia the crepe hanger’s dream girl.

There are no rough spots in Presley’s singing though and even if the songs are generally bland (save for Hard Hearted Woman and the film opener, Crawfish—later covered by The Clash), Curtiz’s staging and Russell Harlan’s noirish cinematography make King Creole (the film, the nightclub, and Elvis) sizzle. Herbert Baker and Michael V. Gazzo wrote the workmanlike script based on Harold Robbins’ A Stone for Danny Fisher. Baker was both a songwriter and screenwriter with a kaleidoscopic resume; the lyricist for Offenbach’s La Belle Helene, and the scripts for The Girl Can’t Help It and Murderers’ Row among others; though Gazzo was a respected playwright (A Hatful of Rain) he will be forever known as Frank Pentangeli, the man who almost blows the whistle on Michael Corleone in The Godfather II.

Kino Lorber’s new 4K release of King Creole looks sumptuous—Russell Harlan’s (The Thing from Another World, To Kill a Mockingbird) inky black and white cinematography evokes a ripe New Orleans atmosphere turning the King Creole club into a Southern-fried Village Gate. But it is also “one of those” 4K releases whose charms are appreciated by those with stadium-sized TV sets. In other words, don’t worry if you’re too broke for the UHD version, the regular Blu ray from 2020 looks just fine. A second disc includes a standard Blu ray version and a new audio commentary by film historian Imogen Sara Smith. A worthy added attraction is Filmmaker Focus: Leonard Maltin discusses King Creole.