Jailhouse Rock (EOTWS)

End Of The Week Shorts #50 extract: Jailhouse Rock (1957)

I'd never seen an Elvis movie before, so I thought I'd give this a go, and... yeah. An interesting slice of film history. 

Judged as just a film, Jailhouse Rock is a mediocre musical with one stand-out number (that being the iconic sequence of the title). Its sense of morality is quite strange; Elvis is a slight dick, he kills a guy, in prison he becomes an even bigger dick; he gets out, meets a girl and becomes famous, then he becomes a different kind of dick; the girl he has forced himself onto can't get over him, and nor can he get over her, and so he becomes the old dick again - also, a dick he met in jail, but likes, punches him in the throat, welcoming a happy ending. In 1957, the PTA described the film as 'a hackneyed, blown-up tale with cheap human values'. I think I agree. To make an effort to not be such a stiff, this is quite entertaining. If it could make sense of what it wanted to do and say, I'm sure I would have liked it more.