Why does the curl throws an "SSL connect error" ?

Issue

• Curl throws an ssl error :

[root@s2elsp3 ~]# /usr/bin/curl  -k -XGET 'https://user:pass@localhost:9200/_cluster/health?pretty'
curl: (35) SSL connect error
[root@s2elsp3 curl-7.47.1]# /usr/bin/curl -V
curl 7.19.7 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.18 Basic ECC zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2
Protocols: tftp ftp telnet dict ldap ldaps http file https ftps scp sftp
Features: GSS-Negotiate IDN IPv6 Largefile NTLM SSL libz

• Compiling a newer version of curl against SSL and this works :

[root@s2elsp3 curl-7.47.1]# /usr/local/bin/curl -k -XGET 'https://user:password@localhost:9200/_cluster/health?pretty'
{
  "cluster_name" : "elasticSearchPROD2",
  "status" : "green",
  "timed_out" : false,
  "number_of_nodes" : 10,
  "number_of_data_nodes" : 10,
  "active_primary_shards" : 676,
  "active_shards" : 1352,
  "relocating_shards" : 0,
  "initializing_shards" : 0,
  "unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "number_of_pending_tasks" : 0,
  "number_of_in_flight_fetch" : 0
}

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 does not appear to have this issue.