Elvis Presley spent the first two weeks of August 1960 learning to ride a horse. According to the fan history site Elvis Australia, he got thrown once and walked away without a scratch.
He was 25 and just back from the Army. His last movie, G.I. Blues, was a light comedy packed with songs, and fans loved it.
This next one was going to be different.
The film was Flaming Star, a Western from 20th Century Fox. Elvis played Pacer Burton, the son of a white Texas rancher and a Kiowa mother. The Kiowa are a Native American nation from the southern Great Plains. When fighting breaks out between the settlers and the Kiowa, Pacer gets stuck in the middle, and neither side really trusts him.
His mother was played by Dolores del Río, a Mexican star who’d been famous since the silent movie days. John McIntire played his father, and Steve Forrest played his half-brother, Clint.
And the part wasn’t written for Elvis at all. Back in 1958, Fox had announced Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra as the two brothers, but that deal fell apart.
The studio still sold it like a big, tense drama, as the old trailer shows.
Elvis Presley Flaming Star original trailer
The director was Don Siegel, who’d go on to make Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood. At first, he had doubts. In his memoir, Siegel wrote that he asked producer David Weisbart, “Why Presley?” Weisbart’s answer was, “Certainly he’s no Brando. On the other hand, Brando’s no Presley.”
Elvis wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, and he wanted fewer songs to get there.
That turned into a real fight. Fox expected music in an Elvis picture, so he recorded four songs for this one. Two got cut before release, and accounts differ on who pushed hardest for that, Elvis or Siegel.
What’s left is a title song over the opening credits and one happy number at a family birthday party near the start. After that, he doesn’t sing again for the rest of the film.
That party is about the last carefree minute the Burtons get.
Elvis Presley – A Cane And A High Starched Collar (1960) Complete Original movie scene HD
Shooting took place on the Fox lot and out in the hills near Thousand Oaks, California, including the Conejo Movie Ranch. A street near one of the locations was later named Flaming Star Avenue.
Siegel later told Rolling Stone that Elvis was “sensitive and very good” but “very unsure of himself.” Once he got him to relax, Siegel said, “I thought he gave a beautiful performance.”
Critics noticed, too. The New York Times called it “an unpretentious but sturdy Western that takes the time, the place and the people seriously.” Several reviewers wrote that Elvis was getting better with every movie.
But Flaming Star came out in December 1960, about a month after G.I. Blues, and made far less money. South Africa even banned it for a while because of Pacer’s mixed family.
For most of the decade that followed, his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, steered him toward light musicals.
Decades later, director Quentin Tarantino called it “maybe the most brutally violent American western of its era.”
The hills where Pacer rode are still out there, and one fan went back to film them.