The musician Quentin Tarantino insisted could have been Hollywood’s top star: ‘He was a prisoner’
If there is one thing Quentin Tarantino loves almost as much as making movies, it’s talking about movies. After all, the Pulp Fiction auteur has often been labelled an “encyclopedia of movies” who is familiar with every star of every era of Hollywood filmmaking, and has also spent a lifetime absorbing the cinema of other countries. Charmingly, Tarantino has always loved all kinds of films, too, from arthouse fare to dingy, low-rent exploitation films.
Tarantino’s love of talking about movies also extends to writing about them, and he has always been open about how movie criticism shaped his tastes as he grew up. He loved reading the takes of famous critics like Pauline Kael, and that affinity for the art of dissecting what did and didn’t work about a film spurred him to craft his own book of criticism in 2022: Cinema Speculation.
Within the pages of this tome, Tarantino wrote about his childhood as a young film fanatic in 1970s Los Angeles, and tied his evolution as a cinephile to the important movies he consumed along the way. He wrote passionately about classics like Dirty Harry, Deliverance, and Taxi Driver, but also movies that taught him what could go wrong, such as Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore. Along the way, Tarantino waxed poetic about the stars of the day, and who could have been the biggest if only they’d dedicated more care to their movie career.
“Along with Paul Newman and Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen was the biggest of the younger male movie stars of the ’60s,” Tarantino wrote in his opening chapter about McQueen’s Bullitt. “The UK had its share of exciting young leading men like Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Albert Finney, and Terence Stamp, but of the young sexy guys in America — that were also genuine movie stars — it was McQueen, Newman, and Beatty.”
Tarantino was adamant that America had one more bona fide icon waiting in the wings who could have surpassed McQueen, Newman, and Beatty. The problem was that he wasn’t an actor by trade, and therefore didn’t take his movie career seriously. Elvis Presley began making movies in the mid-’50s and continued throughout the ’60s. They were primarily branding exercises to enhance his already skyrocketing music career, with some of the more famous titles being Jailhouse Rock, Love Me Tender, and Viva Las Vegas, although according to Tarantino, this didn’t necessarily mean they were bad films.
“In fact, if he had ever taken his movie career seriously, the young movie star leading man who could have truly given the three actors at the top a run for their money was Elvis Presley,” he added. The issue was simple for Taranitno. “Elvis was a prisoner of both Colonel Tom Parker and his own success,” the Reservoir Dogs director argued. “Elvis made two movies a year, and none of them ever lost money. Now, not all those Elvis movies were bad. Some were better than others. But it’s safe to say they weren’t real movies; they were ‘Elvis Presley movies.'”
Tarantino’s conviction that Elvis had the chops to go toe to toe with luminaries like McQueen, Newman, and Beatty if only he made “real movies” is certainly admirable. It is true that Elvis never truly got an opportunity to show what he was capable of in a movie that wasn’t an advertisement for his music, but then again, it’s also not clear if Elvis ever wanted to push himself in that way.
He did once tell Life magazine, “I want to become a good actor,” but the fact that he followed that up with, “because you can’t build a whole career on just singing,” potentially speaks volumes. This indicates that Elvis only saw acting as a means to an end, even if he genuinely wanted to be proficient at it.
Whatever the case, Tarantino – a self-confessed Elvis superfan – was convinced his idol had what it took to get to the very top of Hollywood. Considering his encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema in all its forms, and his penchant for getting great performances out of his actors, perhaps he’s on to something.
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