Seventy years ago this Sunday, Elvis Presley’s very first movie opened in New York City. “Love Me Tender” premiered on November 15, 1956, at the Paramount Theater on Broadway, right in the heart of Times Square.
The Paramount didn’t stop at putting his name in lights.
It put Elvis himself up there. Well, a 40-foot version of him. A giant likeness of Elvis as his character, Clint Reno, was raised on top of the theater’s marquee, high above the crowds on the sidewalk below.
People came out to see it go up. Motion Picture Herald, the movie business’s trade paper back then, wrote on November 3, 1956, that “Times Square looked like New Year’s Eve, with thousands of cheering fans and sightseers” at the unveiling of the figure.
That’s a big welcome for a young singer making his first film. Plenty of grown-ups in 1956 still saw Elvis as the kid with the guitar who made them nervous. Hollywood was brand new to him, and he wanted to get it right. Writer Ray Connolly, in a 2017 Daily Mail piece on the making of the film, said Elvis was “so keen to impress that he memorised all the other actors’ lines, too.”
A fan channel has pieced together his very first day on the set, August 22, 1956, and it’s worth a look for how new all of this was to him.
Elvis’s first day on a movie set in 1956
Now, back to Broadway. A 40-foot Elvis would have been enough for most theaters. The Paramount added one more touch.
On November 10, 1956, Motion Picture Herald reported what was hanging from the giant’s wrist: “The world’s largest charm bracelet, nine feet long, as worn by the 40-foot figure of Elvis Presley.”
A charm bracelet. On Elvis. Nine feet of it, swinging over Broadway for the whole run of the film.
And the bracelet wasn’t only for show. The paper said copies could be ordered from the Halogene Corporation “as gifts for the Elvis Presley Fan Clubs.” So the fan clubs could get a small version of the one the big Elvis was wearing up on the marquee.
The movie did just fine with all that attention. According to the American Film Institute, “Love Me Tender” earned back its cost about two weeks after its national release.
Up in New York the film had the giant Elvis and the bracelet, but it was playing in theaters all over the country. This 1956 clip from the CBS 8 San Diego archive shows the movie’s run at the Orpheum Theatre in San Diego, a rare look at that very first season.
Love Me Tender playing at a San Diego theater in 1956
Elvis had his own quiet way of seeing the movie with a crowd.
Back home in Memphis, Connolly wrote, Elvis went to a local cinema a couple more times to sit with the audience and watch himself on the big screen. He was “always slipping out before the lights came up at the end so that no-one would see him.”
So while thousands cheered a 40-foot Elvis in Times Square, the real one was sitting in the dark back home, watching people watch him. This Sunday marks 70 years since it all began on Broadway.