Flaming Star

Elvis Presley plays Pacer Burton, a character who takes on racial animosity in Don Siegel’s 1960 Western film, Flaming Star. The son of a Kiowa woman and a white man, Burton finds himself caught between two worlds when violence breaks out between the Kiowa people, a Native American tribe of the Great Plains, and their neighbors, white settlers in a small 1870s Texan town. Although the film did not achieve the commercial success of some of Siegel’s later work it did help to cement Elvis’s role in the popular imagination: the publicity photo from Flaming Star inspired Andy Warhol’s famous Triple Elvis [Ferus type]. In each screen print in this series, Warhol shows the image of the wide-stanced, gun-wielding Elvis repeated, as though moving back and forth across a movie screen.

Film Details

Director: Don Siegel

Year: 1960

Running time: 101 minutes

Country: United States

Format: DCP

Print source: Criterion Pictures USA