Douglass Brode’s book entitled Elvis Cinema and Popular Culture goes into great detail describing the plots, characters, and effects of each Elvis film.  In his introduction, “All Singing!  All Dancing!  All Elvis!,” Brode makes a point of emphasizing that Elvis’ dream as a young boy growing up in Tennessee was to become a movie star, not a musician.  It was perhaps for this reason that Elvis decided to take his fame to the silver-screen over a carreer of fifteen years.  Though Elvis’ acting career stemmed from his popularity as a Rock and Roll singer, his films were not about music, or even about Elvis himself.  Instead, as Brode notes, “under a series of names and guises, Elvis – shifting from contemporary settings to one place or time period and then the next – portrays a continuing persona […]  Viewed chronologically, [his films] offer a vivid cinematic canvas that portrays America in the process of renewing and redefining itself.”  In Brode’s chapter on Elvis’ 1957 film, Jailhouse Rock, for example, we learn that the film was made to reflect the social troubles in America due to the recession and economic problems under Eisenhower.  The chapter goes on to tell the plot of the film about a young southern boy named Vince played by Elvis, and its reflection of popular culture and the effects it later had on it.
    In order to be able to claim that A Hard Day’s Night was the first film to successfully unite the pop cultures of film and cinema, I would need evidence in support of why the previous rock films were unsuccessful.  This book, Elvis Cinema and Popular Culture does just that.  Where A Hard Day’s Night was a movie about The Beatles, each playing themselves, with the purpose of showing the world a day in the life of the “Fab Four,” the Elvis films, as described by Brode, have fictional stories in different time periods and do not even star Elvis as himself.  For these reasons, it is clear that the Elvis films were not made for the purpose of putting music’s pop culture on screen.  Instead, they were made to make money by simply starring a popular musician: Elvis Presley.  The Elvis films were, in some respects, social commentaries disguised behind silly and often unengaging plots, whereas A Hard Day’s Night was the first film to star music’s new rock and rollers to portray them being rock and rollers.