In 1956 Elvis Presley made his very first movie. It was called “Love Me Tender,” a Western from 20th Century Fox, and he wasn’t even the star of it. He played Clint Reno, the youngest of four brothers in a family pulled apart by the Civil War.
His fans just wanted to see Elvis. And the studio handed his character a sad road through the story.
When Fox showed the finished film to preview audiences, his young fans were upset by what happened to his character’s fate. These were kids who’d lined up to scream for him, and the ending left them hurt. The studio got the message fast.
So they called him back for one more day of work. 70 years ago tomorrow, on October 29, 1956, Elvis walked into a small studio in New York to fix it. He was already in town. The day before, he’d been on Ed Sullivan in front of the whole country.
What Fox had him do was pretty simple. They filmed a brand-new closing shot, just Elvis’s face singing “Love Me Tender,” laid over the last scene of the movie so his fans would leave the theater hearing him one more time. The work got done at a place called Junco Studios on East 69th Street. The clapperboard that afternoon showed the date and the name “R. Webb,” for the director Robert D. Webb.
And then the film of that day vanished for almost seventy years.
In 2025, FOX 5 New York dug about two minutes of silent film of the shoot out of the old Fox Movietone archive. Nobody had watched it in decades. Angie Marchese, who has been the archivist at Graceland for years, called the footage “pretty priceless.” FOX 5’s Peter Facini said the young Elvis in it even “looks different.”
Watch it and you can see why people say that. There’s Elvis setting up the shot, then stepping out to greet fans on the sidewalk and climbing into a waiting car. Fans have noticed one more odd thing about that last shot too. His hair looks darker in it than it does through the rest of the movie.
FOX 5 New York built the whole discovery into a short feature, with the real 1956 film inside it.
The lost 1956 film of Elvis shooting the new ending, with the story behind it
And this is the TV moment from the night before, when he sang the same song live for millions of people at home.
Elvis singing “Love Me Tender” on Ed Sullivan the night before
“Love Me Tender” opened on November 15, 1956, at the Paramount Theatre in New York, new ending and all. The title song went on to become one of his signatures. For almost seventy years that little New York afternoon was just a story people told, until somebody finally found the film of it.