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Close your eyes and think of Elvis. Are you imagining the flabby, sweaty Elvis who spent the last few years of his life squeezed into white jump suits entertaining middle aged audiences in Las Vegas? Or the teenage Elvis whose sullen indifference and sexually charged performances scared America half to death? Or perhaps you prefer to remember the countless celluloid portraits of Elvis: a rebellious punk in Jailhouse Rock, the blue-eyed soldier boy of Blue Hawaii, the swinging, psychedelic Elvis of Easy Come, Easy Go or the leather- suited confidence of the '68 Comeback Special.

Elvis's image has been hijacked like no other 20th-century icon, as the raft of kitsch, burger-munching, jumpsuited Elvis clones amply proves. But in recent years the cinematic reflection of Elvis has been equally degrading - the three most recent films to include images of the King all feature doppelgangers. In last year's heist caper 3000 Miles From Graceland, Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell wore wigs, sunglasses, sideburns and the obligatory flared jumpsuits to rob a Vegas casino; in current Disney flick Lilo & Stitch, a cute alien turns even cuter Elvis impersonator; and in soon-to-be- released offbeat drama Bubba Ho-tep, two nursing home residents are convinced they are Elvis Presley and President Kennedy and form an unlikely double-act.

It wasn't always like this. Until a few years ago, celluloid Elvis was an ethereal presence guiding the lives of fans like Nicholas Cage in Wild At Heart and Christian Slater in True Romance from beyond the grave. People took the mythology of Elvis seriously. Now, however, a new flippancy has stripped Elvis Presley of much of his abundant sexual mystique and dangerous allure.

Elvis himself would have enjoyed the ridicule and irreverence. One of the star's most endearing qualities, captured so well in the rehearsal scenes of Vegas-era documentary Elvis: That's The Way It Is, was a natural, self-effacing humour. Besides, he was used to derision, especially when it came to his movie career.

Summing up his 31 films as an actor, critic Pauline Kael wrote that they "ranged from mediocre to putrid, and just about in that order". Plenty of fans agree, viewing Elvis's Hollywood years as a decade-long blip in an otherwise brilliant career. To others, it is a case of before and after. There is the pre-draft Elvis who made four great movies (Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole) and the post-draft Elvis who returned from Germany to make a succession of increasingly dumb family- friendly comedies.

To many, the real Elvis only reappeared in 1970 when he gave up acting and returned to live performance. This, though, is to ignore too great a chunk of the Elvis artistic canon. Many of his Sixties movies may be poor, but they still starred Elvis, featured the occasional classic tune and an endless bevy of Capri-panted beauties. Can they really be that bad?

Elvis may have succeeded as a singer but his greatest teenage ambition was originally to be a movie star like his boyhood hero Tony Curtis and later to be taken seriously as an actor. Eager to tap into the youth market created by James Dean, who at great inconvenience to Hollywood had died in a car crash, a 21-year-old Elvis was rushed into the cast of Love Me Tender in 1956.

Considering the steep learning curve and a demanding role, the untrained actor was unconcerned about the trials that lay ahead "I've made a study of Marlon Brando," he told a newspaper columnist. "I've made a study of poor Jimmy Dean. I've made a study of myself, and I know why girls - at least the young 'uns - go for us. We're sullen, we're brooding, we're something of a menace... I don't know anything about Hollywood, but I know you can't be sexy if you smile. You can't be a rebel if you grin."

Elvis was as good as his word, his smouldering presence in Love Me Tender and flimsily disguised bio-pic Loving You are full of brooding, sullen pouting - so much so that Time magazine famously compared his performance to a goldfish. Love Me Tender set a precedent that would continue with all subsequent Elvis movies - the shoe-horning in of musical numbers, even when totally unsuited to the movie. When all Elvis really wanted to do was act.

In 1958, Elvis Presley was drafted into the American army, but before he became Private 53 310 761 he was given a 60-day deferment so he could finish what was to become his finest 116 minutes on the big screen, King Creole.

Based on the Harold Robbins novel A Stone For Danny Fisher, Elvis stars as a young delinquent who comes up from the ghetto to seek his fame and fortune in the seedy jazz clubs of New Orleans. Like just a handful of Elvis movies, King Creole had a first-class director on board (Michael Curtiz had previously made Casablanca) and an excellent supporting cast including Carolyn Jones as a vamp and Walter Matthau as a heavy-handed mobster. Matthau later told the BBC he thought Elvis was "elegant" and "an instinctive actor". Reviewing the movie, the New York Times was stunned, running the headline "Cut my legs off and call me shorty! Elvis can act!" Despite its critical success, King Creole, a far more dramatic movie than the others, was the least successful of the four pre-army Elvis movies, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by Elvis's manager, Colonel Parker.

According to Quentin Tarantino, the film choices made for Presley after he returned from the army were a tragedy. "He could have been a truly terrific actor if he had worked with a lot of other real actors," he says. Instead Elvis got shunted from one star vehicle to the next with nary a concern about plot, direction or supporting cast.

The most important factor in Colonel Parker's eyes was cost. He'd tied Elvis to a studio contract that meant he couldn't tour or appear on television. Instead they took a 50 per cent cut of the budget and profits for each film (even in the Sixties that landed them $1m plus per film), hired B- movie "quickie" directors who would get films shot in weeks (Harum Scarum in 1965 took just 15 days) and then doubled their loot on the soundtrack albums. Parker and Presley followed the money, with Elvis only returning to live performances once his movies started losing cash at the box office.

Most Elvis movies follow a set formula: he will have an all- American name like Glenn (Wild In The Country), Chad (Blue Hawaii) or Greg (Live A Little, Love A Little); he will have a manly occupation such as boxer (Kid Gallahad), soldier (GI Blues), racing driver (Spinout, Viva Las Vegas and Speedway), or trapeze artist (Fun In Acapulco), and he will be seen in an exotic location. There will be cute children; there will be a fight where Elvis is entirely innocent; there will be a race which Elvis will win and girls galore will magically appear from everywhere and gaze at him in awe whenever he chances upon a guitar and starts to sing - even if the song is embarrassingly awful like "Song Of The Shrimp" from Girls! Girls! Girls! ("If I live to be 90, I will never forget/The little shrimp and the song he sang as he jumped into the net").

Even though many of the late Sixties films were crass and silly, they have now become camp classics - Harum Scarum features Elvis in a burnous leading a gang of bongo-playing assassins; in the daft Clambake, he swaps his life as a millionaire for that of a jet ski instructor and gets to meet Flipper the TV dolphin; Paradise, Hawaiian Style features a Elvis slowly losing weight as the film progresses (he was put on a crash diet by the film's producer).

There are also some genuinely good post-draft Elvis movies. In the moody western Flaming Star he's excellent as the "half-breed" Native American struggling to make peace with himself. While Blue Hawaii (essentially a Bing Crosby-style musical), Speedway (in which Elvis rocks a fantastic mod look as a lady-lovin' stock car racing bachelor), and Viva Las Vegas (with its stunning set pieces and excellent Nancy Sinatra duet) are all fantastic, funny, feel-good matinee masterpieces.

His desire to play it straight led to a couple of peculiar late roles - as a gunslinger in the lifeless western Charro! and as a doctor who falls in love with a nun in Change of Habit - but it was too little too late.

It's a shame that while the Beatles and the Stones rewrote rock'n'roll history, the response of the man who inspired them was to sing about doing "the clam" with a bunch of bikini babes in an appalling lightweight comedy. But he knew it.