The off-screen story around Paget has taken on a life of its own over the decades. Rumors persisted that Elvis was taken with her enough to consider proposing, and that she declined, reportedly drawn instead to Howard Hughes. What’s more concrete is that Paget’s look in the film—particularly her hair—made an impression that echoed later. Years afterward, Priscilla Presley would be influenced by Paget’s style, a small thread connecting Elvis’s early Hollywood life to the world he eventually built around himself.
One of the film’s strangest balancing acts is how it tries to sit in 1865 while also serving 1956. Elvis’s presence bends the setting. When he sings, the era shifts. The songs don’t feel like Civil War folk music as much as a pop idol stepping into a costume drama and bringing modern magnetism with him. That tension is part of the appeal: the movie is a Western story, but it’s also a document of a cultural eruption. Continue reading…
