Movie Monday: Elvis: The Movie

Before Escape From New York, before The Thing, before Big Trouble in Little China, there was...Elvis The Movie?

Yes, Elvis: The Movie, a fairly obscure title in the filmography of John Carpenter, it was the director's first project after Halloween, and his first collaboration with star Kurt Russell. Apparently the producers of this TV mini-series assumed that since Carpenter famously did the score for Halloween, he must know a lot about music. Ergo, let him direct a bio-pic of one of the most famous people of the 20th Century, a mere two years after he died so prematurely. Apparently no one was more surprised than Carpenter (he mentions getting the gig on the audio commentary to The Thing), believing he was not that appropriate a choice. He took the job anyway.

Elvis: The Movie opens in the early 1970s, featuring the King getting ready for yet another gig, surrounded by his retinue of buddies and body guards. As massively successful as any one could be at their chosen profession, Elvis is nonetheless not a happy man:

After a tense meeting with his wife Priscilla (Season Hubley, Russell's future real-life wife), Elvis does one of the things he is still most famous for: shooting out his hotel TV. The film then jumps back to the 1940s, and follows Elvis as a kid who from the beginning has a passion and knack for music. As the opening scene hints, Elvis: The Movie follows a rigidly predictable bio-pic formula: all the major moments that even the most cursory Elvis fan knows about: the early recordings with Sam Phillips, Elvis' close relationship with his devoted mother (Shelley Winters), his meeting with the Col. Tom Parker (Pat Hingle), his ascension to stardom, his marriage to Priscilla, his movie career, etc. It's all here:

Russell makes a pretty good Elvis, and that had to be a tough job: Elvis: The Movie was shot less than two years after the King died, and was filmed with cooperation of the Presley estate. So there aren't a whole lot of dark corners for the role (and the film) to venture into. There are brief moments where we see the man desperately unhappy, and he flies off the handle at Priscilla and his famous crew of hangers-on. But for the most part, Elvis is shown pretty much exactly how you'd expect his estate would want him to be shown: as a legend. Heck, even after three hours, the movie still ends in 1971, long before the King grew obese and became (mostly) a parody of himself, a walking, lumbering example of showbiz excess.

You'd be hard pressed to find any of John Carpenter's signature filmmaking touches here; it almost seems like he took this job to show people that he could do more than gritty genre pictures where people got killed left and right. It's a predictable movie, sitting squat in the middle of an era where it seemed like the man couldn't make a predictable movie to save his life (seriously; I don't think there are many directors who can match Carpenter's run of movies from around 1976 until 1986 or so).


There was, however, one scene in Elvis: The Movie that really stood out to me, and seemed like a hint of the kind of direction the film could have gone: Elvis records a version of "Suspicious Minds" (one of my favorite songs of his) with his band in his living room, with the band and back-up singer sitting on couches and whatnot:

 

Having to fit such an extraordinary life in just three hours, Elvis: The Movie tends to just fly from one Big Moment to the next, but here Carpenter lets the whole recording session play out, with no cutaways, and the sense of energy is palpable. It's the closest the movie comes to conveying just how good Elvis was, what made him so special.

Late in his recording career, Elvis insisted on cutting songs live with his entire band, all at once. That's not conducive to grinding out product like record companies want, but a lot of great musicians have insisted on doing it this way, feeling it produces the best results (an Elvis disciple if there ever was one, Bob Dylan, has almost insisted on this approach his entire career). When I read that in a book about Elvis, I got the sense that he knew he had gotten far away from his roots, and wanted to retain some sense of artistic control, to hell with Col. or RCA. This scene, on purpose or not, really puts that across in a thrilling way. I could have watched a whole lot more of this, and less of Elvis and his Momma, or Elvis arguing with Priscilla.

Elvis: The Movie is available on DVD, but I don't think anyone outside of die-hard Elvis fans bother with it; it doesn't feel like a John Carpenter movie and of course Russell went on to a huge career as a movie star. But of course any fan of their film collaborations (me!) is happy they did this, because without it we might never have gotten their later, enduring body of work.