Barely outrunning a looming Army Draft deadline, producer Hal Wallis rushed this Elvis Presley film along on a hack script from Herbert Baker & Michael Gazzo loaded with enough tough luck story beats to fill a season’s-worth of kitchen sink tv dramas. But its up-from-the-gutter account of an accidental singing sensation (adapted to the music clubs of New Orleans from Harold Robbins’ NYC boxing novel) moves along nicely under Michael Curtiz’s muscular helming. Occasionally lovely in spare location shooting, and with striking action stuff for Elvis, it offers a priceless final look (and hear) at ‘the King’ before he came back groomed from military service with the rough edges polished off. The slightly amateurish lad with a month’s pomade in his hair and the natural jangle in his voice & hormones never quite the same again.* With all-round excellent support (Carolyn Jones’s ‘used’ girl with a good heart especially fine, so too Walter Matthau’s power boss once he decides on an accent), Wallis thought it the best of his eight with Presley.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Something also went missing when Elvis was upped from b&w to color for those anodyne travelogue-themed pics, suddenly aware of his acting/performing effects.
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