Celebrate the King by Skipping “Elvis” and Streaming “Flaming Star” By Dante A. Ciampaglia

When was the last time you thought about Elvis Presley? When did you last think about breathing?

Elvis is everywhere and nowhere — in music and marriage, camp and cliché, a singular entity who inspired countless imitators and reshaped nearly every facet of American life. Forty-five years after his death, his endurance is something of a paradox — more complicated and confusing, more bloated and bewildering, yet more lasting and lucrative. (He was seventh on Forbes’ 2021 list of Highest Paid Dead Celebrities, earning $30 million.) Love him or/and hate him, this much is indisputable: The King of Rock and Roll isn’t just part of the national firmament; there’s a strand of our cultural DNA that wears a spangled jumpsuit, pompadour, and curled lip.

Baz Luhrmann’s gaudy biopic Elvis, an extravagant, and extra, jukebox extravaganza drags Presley — the persona, if not the man — into the zeitgeist in a way we’re unaccustomed. This isn’t a film about Elvis impersonators or pilgrims seeking Presley’s ghost. It’s a take on the hip-shaking Earthshaker from Tupelo, Mississippi, himself, inexplicably told from the perspective of Colonel Tom Parker, the parasite who, for worse or worse, did as much to shape Elvis as Elvis himself. (Even in death the Colonel robs the King of his agency.)

Centered on such a multifaceted and refracted artist, Elvis has offered many contemporary critics many opportunities for takes: on the songs, on the persona, on the Parker-Presley relationship. Some have even tackled his films, arguably the most mystifying aspects of his career. Not that he made them — the economics are crystal clear. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be much there. After all, how much can someone say about Viva Las Vegas (1964) or Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962) or, um, Tickle Me (1965)?

The King’s filmography is anything but regal. We’ve got the good Colonel to thank for that. Like every other part of Elvis’ career, Parker had an iron grip on what roles his client could take and what would be detrimental to his “image.” From Love Me Tender in 1956 to Change of Habit in 1969, Elvis starred in more than 30 films, with seemingly just as many roles that were never realized. (Elvis as Tony in West Side Story? Tom Hagen in The Godfather? Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy? The mind reels.) The movies he did make tended to follow a formula: a handsome singer, a beautiful woman, a madcap scenario of light conflict and romantic mishaps, the handsome singer and beautiful woman get together at the end. Cue cheering audiences and, most importantly, chart-topping hits. Something like Viva Las Vegas or Blue Hawaii (1961) makes sense in that spirit and helped shape how we see Elvis today: a casino main room self-parody. Four years earlier, Jailhouse Rock (1957) helped conjure the image the slightly dangerous sex symbol with the thousand-watt smile and vocal cords of gold. But regardless of the time or visage, it was clear the films were more a way to line someone’s (read: the Colonel’s) pockets than showcase Elvis’ acting.

That makes Flaming Star — a tough Western, directed by Don Siegel and released in 1960 — such an anomaly, and a gift.

Presley stars as Pacer Burton, a half-white, half-Kiowa at the center of a frontier war in 1870s Texas. On one side are white ranchers scratching out a meager specter of the American Dream; on the other are Native peoples displaced by Manifest Destiny. Pacer’s father (John McIntire), is white, as is his half-brother Clint (Steve Forrest); his mother, Neddy (Dolores Del Rio), is Kiowa; and the Burton homestead is located, physically and symbolically, between the settlers’ tumbledown clapboard town and the Kiowa camp. After friends are brutally murdered by a group of Kiowa raiders, the Burtons’ multiracial home becomes a focal point for the war: the townspeople implore Clint, “the only real white man in the family,” join their posse, while Buffalo Horn (Rodolfo Acosta), the new Kiowa chief, demands Pacer join “his people.”

Flaming Star is fairly rote as Westerns go: things go bad for everyone, and as you’d expect from a Western of the period, it traffics in pretty ugly stereotypes and representations of Indigenous peoples. But Siegel is no mere journeyman director, and he elevates what could be a rickety episode of television into something approaching art that exists in conversation with Fred Zinneman’s 1952 High Noon (one man abandoned to face certain death), John Ford’s 1956 The Searchers (blinding racist vengeance), and Howard Hawks’ 1959 Rio Bravo (youthquake pop star Ricky Nelson as a gunslinger). When the posse comes for Clint, for instance, Siegel lets the camera pan methodically across the faces of eight rugged men atop their horses, capturing the range of emotions — anger, fear, sadness, regret, bloodlust — coursing through the town. Later, during a hilltop funeral, Siegel frames one of the most beautiful shots in a Western: five people gathered around an open grave, the Burton homestead down below in the background, each person standing at a different plane but all in focus, the shot radiating with a golden, earthy glow. He also imbues the film with the kind of intimate violence — during the opening raid, one farmer gets a tomahawk in the face, which we see in a fairly shocking closeup — that would come to shape New Hollywood, including Siegel’s later film, Dirty Harry (1971).

Clearly this is not typical Elvis fare, starting with the fact that he gets to act. “This is a very demanding role for Elvis,” Siegel told the New York Times for an October 4, 1960, set report. “He is playing a part that was supposed to have been for Marlon Brando.” Indeed, Elvis is quite good in the film. And while his is still a pretty face, it exists in an extremely ugly world. No New Frontier glitz here; just cruelty, racism, and murder. Oh, and he dies. (Spoiler alert, though it’s in the title, which refers to the “flaming star of death” Kiowa see before the end.) This might all help explain why Flaming Star isn’t exactly in the Elvis cinematic canon. It barely broke even at the box office, and its bleakness is a stark contrast to the comparative triviality of G.I. Blues (1960). That helps explain the increasingly silly films that followed, a reflexive response to “give Elvis fans what they want.” Did it matter that they increasingly avoided theaters and the young people who did go wanted nothing to do with something like Clambake (1967)? Not a lick.

These kinds of neglected jewels are always fascinating. But what makes Flaming Star even more of a treasure is that, despite the shabby aesthetic and grim tone, there’s quite a bit here that’s favorable to Elvis’ image. For starters, he’s tough as nails and arguably the most decisive character in the film. His hair is also outstanding, a pomaded pompadour that hints at an oil discovery somewhere out on the trail. After a sweaty, knock-down fist fight that leaves the other party bloodied and hobbled, nary a hair is out of place on Pacer’s head. (When Clint gets a mirror for his birthday, Pacer says it will make his brother “the prettiest fella in Texas.” Pretty sure Pacer holds that title.) The film opens with Elvis singing the title song, over footage of Pacer and Clint bounding home; 90 seconds after the opening credits end, Pacer is strumming a guitar and singing to friends and family in the Burton home. Eighty-one minutes into the 101-minute film, Elvis takes his shirt off. I don’t know what fans thought 62 years ago, but from here this is a solid Elvis outing.

But Flaming Star was a flame out, as far as the Colonel (the film’s “technical adviser”) was concerned, and Elvis was retrenched in frivolity. You can almost hear that charlatan panderingly telling Elvis as the film ends, “Well, you got that out of your system. Now back to my way.” And for six decades, it has largely been a cinephile cult curio, at best. (The film got a slight bump eight years ago thanks to a limited-edition Blu-Ray release). Though most people know it, without actually knowing it: Andy Warhol’s series of silver Elvises, silkscreens of the star pointing a gun that command hundreds of millions of dollars at auction, began as a Flaming Star publicity still.

The film deserves a better afterlife than Pop Art footnote. It’s a solid Western that punches above its weight, whose warning of racism’s total physical, spiritual, and civic destruction is as urgent today as it was in 1960. That it stars Elvis Presley as the surrogate for this existential crisis in a morally gray genre picture — there are no clear-cut bad guys; everyone, save the Burtons, is some degree of despicable — should seal it as some kind of classic. But even if all that proves unconvincing, Flaming Star is worth salvaging from the dustbin of film history simply because Elvis didn’t make another movie like it. He somehow snuck an interesting picture past the Colonel, showed glimpses of a fuller acting life… and was rewarded by never having the chance again.

Anyone who counts themselves an Elvis fan owes it to the King to give Flaming Star a chance — and to stick it to the Colonel.

Flaming Star is available on various streaming services. There is also a now-out-of-print Blu-Ray from Twilight Time that’s worth tracking down.