Elvis Dispatch #1: Flaming Star (1960)

Directed by Don Siegel, Flaming Star was originally supposed to be a vehicle for Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra as the interracial brothers, but instead we get Elvis Presley and Steve Forrest. The story of a war between the Kiowa Indians and the white settlers, Flaming Star focuses on one family torn apart by the war. Sam Burton (John McIntire) married a Kiowa Indian (Dolores Del Rio – because, yeah, she’s Native American) for his second wife, and they had a son, Pacer (Presley). Pacer’s older brother Clint (Steve Forrest), from “Pa”‘s previous marriage is white, and Pacer is a half-breed. (Cue Cher.) They are a happy family. They are accepted by the community, until the Kiowa Indians start making threatening overtures, and then the Burtons are regarded with suspicion. Whose side will they be on in the coming war? Will Pacer go with his people? But he was raised in a white community and has very flimsy ties to his Indian side. But as events intensify, as the threats from the Kiowas grow, and as the threats from the whites grow, Pacer finds himself divided. He’s angry. He begins to question his loyalties.

The trailer for Flaming Star shows, mainly, a shirtless Presley having a knock-down-drag-out fight with some dude in the rocky landscape. It makes it seem like Presley is shirtless for the entire thing (which, of course, is the point: get the girls in the seats! Presley’s taking his shirt off!) It also makes it seem like Barbara Eden is somehow his “girl”, when, in fact, she plays the feisty girlfriend of his brother. There is no love story for Presley in Flaming Star, which in and of itself makes it an interesting choice for him, and a bold one. The trailer does its best to misguide the audience.

With all of the pressure to give “Elvis Presley(TM)” to his fans, Flaming Star is a very good movie, and sort of an anomaly in Presley’s career. No love story? It’s not a musical? It’s a Western? It takes place in the past? It’s a pretty bold choice, all around. Presley plays an isolated brooding character, only really relaxed when in the bosom of his own family. You can see why Brando would have been good in the role as well. But Presley, in good material, shows his capacity for strong simple acting, and truth. He doesn’t push. He doesn’t lie. He seems incapable of it, which is why he so often seemed rather awkward (in interviews, I mean). Whatever he did, he had to mean it. In some of the other Elvis Presley vehicles, he obviously meant everything he did there too (as much as he disliked many of those movies), but in Flaming Star you can see how that manifested in good material. Presley is easy and intuitive, with a fluidity of talent that allows him to move from joshing his brother about how his girlfriend wears “britches” to highly dramatic scenes of conflict and confrontation.

Flaming Star is really about racism, and Dolores Del Rio, as Neddy, has been shunned by the Kiowas for marrying a white man, and while she has lived side by side peacefully with whites for years, when the Indians start stirring up trouble, she becomes the focus of resentment and rage. Not only Pacer is caught between two worlds. Pa and Clint are, too, even though they are white. Because this is their wife/mother, they love her. That doesn’t mean they excuse the brutality of the Indian attacks, but at a certain point, the world will force them all to choose a side.

Heavy stuff, and a very progressive message.

One of the things I love about movies in the past of a certain kind is that directors were unafraid to give the audiences a little bit of what they wanted before getting down to the real business of the story. By that I mean: Flaming Star opens with the two brothers coming home, and there’s a gathering of people there, mother, father, neighbors, and they all sit down to dinner, happy to see the boys again. Someone starts playing an accordion, and Presley casually goes to his bunk, grabs a guitar, sits at the kitchen table and starts playing a number, as everyone starts do-si-do-ing around the room. It’s a huge musical number. It happens in the first 2 minutes of the movie. It gives the expectation that we will see more of this. This is an Elvis Presley movie after all. But that’s the only musical number. The rest of the movie is quite dark and gloomy, lots of violence, and a couple of tense scenes of waiting for the Indians to come that reminded me of The Searchers. That first scene, with the big number, obviously serves the purpose to show that Pacer fits into the white community, he’s happy, he’s accepted, blah blah blah. But come on, the real reason for it is that if you have Elvis Presley in a movie and you DON’T have him sing then you automatically are letting the audience down. You haven’t done your job. Throw the audience a bone to soften them up, because things are going to get pretty dark from now on, so we might as well make them happy at the outset, because everyone wants to see Elvis sing. I love how blatant it is, and how unembarrassed it is about how blatant it is. It’s hard to picture a similar scene occurring in a movie today. Howard Hawks talked about how he was criticized for the scene in Rio Bravo when Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing. He was totally baffled by that, his point being: I have Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in a movie and I DON’T have them sing? What kind of director would that make me? He also told Peter Bogdanovich, “Well, I was entertained by them. I wanted to see them sing.” That’s confidence.

Presley is part of an ensemble here, and he fits in great. There’s a moment where a doctor has been called to check on his sick mother. The doctor didn’t want to come because by that point the family had been shunned. Things were getting very dangerous. But he caves and comes anyway. Pacer is already pushed to the limit, by the threats his family has received from all quarters. The doctor, in talking about his mother, refers to her as “that woman”.

Pacer says, ” ‘That woman‘? Don’t she got a name, like white people?”

Watch how Presley says that line. Don’t tell me that man couldn’t act.