Love Me Tender, his first film, captured Elvis “The Pelvis” somewhere between the “lewd” bump-and-grinder of his stage performances and the bisected, singing head image projected by The Ed Sullivan Show. A tender tear/knee jerker in which Presley plays a Texas farm boy who marries his brother's girl while the brother is off losing the Civil War, Love Me Tender is worth seeing for a glimpse of Elvis when he was still a household word, but not yet entertainment for the whole family.
A most interesting aspect of Love Me Tender is the critical response it evoked, genuine outrage coming close to hysteria itself. In Films In Review, for example, Henry Hart devotes several paragraphs to the proof that Elvis is either simulating masturbation or, worse, actually doing it behind his guitar, and places great emphasis on Presley's long hair, “one of today's badges of the psychologically feminized male.” The rest of the review (which hardly touches on the film) is a discussion of the place Love Me Tender will have “in the history of American morals and mores, for Presley is a pied piper who could lead his followers to an end more socially deleterious than their permanent disappearance in a cave.... How a society as dynamic as our own throws up such a monstrosity (as Elvis) is beyond the scope of this review, as are the reasons why some contemporary American teenagers of both sexes react to what Presley does, instead of away from it.” Henry Hart, wherever you were then, where are you now? (J.B.)