Jailhouse Rock
WHEN ELVIS PRESLEY made his third movie in the summer of 1957, he knew, for all the risks, it would yield him a charttopping hit. Sure, Jailhouse Rock was shot in black-and-white during Technicolor’s peak, and yes, his character, Vince Everett, was a hard-to-like thug with few redeeming features. But it also contained a number, the singer believed, which would be his biggest single yet. Namely, um, ‘Treat Me Nice’.
Well, The King can’t be right about everything.
No offence to that silky, boogie-woogie tune, but it had none of the raw, driving energy of the movie’s title song. Written by R&B maestros Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in just a few hours, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ not only became one of Elvis’ best-loved hits, but it also gave cinema one of its greatest rock ’n’ roll moments. It was “the most-remembered rock dance number ever produced by a major motion-picture studio,” according to Elvis discographer Ace Collins.
Mounted on a sparse set on the MGM lot, with little more than a few cell doors on scaffolding and a fireman’s pole, the ‘Jailhouse Rock’ sequence was stripped back and focused purely on channelling Presley’s stage presence, to such a degree that it came to define his on-screen image. Though it did also put him in hospital. During one particularly energetic hip swing, the 22year-old singer dislodged one of his tooth caps and swallowed it, necessitating a swift trip to the emergency room.
Legend has it that Presley oversaw the sequence — his first-ever choreographed routine — himself. But the truth is not so straightforward. MGM veteran Alex Romero, who’d worked extensively with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, had prepared a more traditional number, and the week before shooting began, took Presley through some of the steps. Worried that the choreographer was going to try and turn him into “a Hollywood boy”, the singer proved resistant. So together they tweaked the sequence to closer reflect Presley’s own signature moves. “I guess he thought I was going to give him some slick dancing steps,” Romero later recalled. “I chose steps that were foreign to him, but that were also like him, so he could pick them up”.
The result must have impressed Kelly. Curious to see what an Elvis dance number would look like, he was present at the rehearsals and reportedly applauded from the side lines. But you can imagine he might have been worried, too. As Romero’s biographer Mark Knowles noted, this was a groundbreaking moment; ‘Jailhouse Rock’ was “a transitional number, propelling the film musical into the modern era”.
Though he might not have been entirely aware of it at the time, Elvis had drawn a thick, black, prison-stripe line between past and future, leaving Kelly on the wrong side.
JAILHOUSE ROCK IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL