Elvis (Warner Bros., Roadshow Entertainment, Bazmark Films, The Jackal Group, Whalerock Industries, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon my old friend and former partner Cat Ortiz took me to the AMC 20 Theatres in Fashion Valley to see Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis, about the life and good and bad times of Elvis Presley. The film generally got rave reviews but my attitude towards it was “yes,” but with a lot of qualifications. I was afraid that the Elvis story would give Luhrmann opportunities for the bizarre overdirection that has marred so many of his movies, and I was more or less right. I think Luhrmann’s best film was the relatively understated 2008 film Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman in a fish-out-of-water tale evoking memories of The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Red River and The African Queen, but its financial failure after the success of Moulin Rouge! (also starring Kidman) seems to have convinced him that the way to sell tickets to his movies is to fill the screen with razzle-dazzle fireworks and not trust the story and his real skills as a director to tell itself without all the flashy gimmicks. Luhrmann not only directed the film but co-wrote its script, though according to the Writers’ Guild codes he went through a lot of collaborators – Jeremy Doner, Craig Pearce, Sam Bronnell – before he finally settled on a script that satisfied him. I quite liked Elvis but I had my qualms about it. A lot of them have to do with the film’s racial politics; Elvis’s life and career are fraught with issues of race and white privilege, and Luhrmann generally does a good job of dramatizing them.

The film is especially strong when it depicts Elvis’s super-manager, “Col.” Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, in what is almost certainly the first out-and-out villain role of his life; Parker remains a controversial figure in the Elvis mythos but Luhrmann and his writers definitely take the “black legend” view of him as an unscrupulous bastard whose self-dealing and limited view of the world stifled Elvis’s potential creativity) as being reluctant at first to get involved in Elvis’s career because he’d heard his records on the radio and assumed he was Black. On the other hand, it depicts Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark, Jr.) in the same way that’s become part of the Elvis myth; supposedly, Elvis took a primitive slow blues song called “That’s All Right, Mama,” rocked it up, added a pulsing rhythm and beat, and turned it into a classic that redefined popular music and took over the world. Clark’s rendition of “That’s All Right, Mama” in the movie is a slowed-down, scratchy-voiced version with only Clark’s voice and acoustic guitar. But then again I first heard Crudup do the song on the recording of the 1972 Newport in New York blues concert, and that left me surprised when I finally heard his original 1946 record on RCA Victor (ironically, also the label Elvis ended up on after his brief career at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records) and the two were arranged virtually identically. The truth, as is readily discernible when you play the two records back to back (as you can do on YouTube; Crudup’s is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt9reGxoqyo and Elvis’s is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmopYuF4BzY), is that the “new” beat Elvis supposedly invented was already audible on Crudup’s record (indeed, Crudup’s version sounds more like rock than Elvis’s, mainly because Crudup used a drummer and Elvis didn’t). All Elvis brought to this music was a white face – which made it acceptable for white radio stations to play it and white listeners to buy it.

The film traverses the usual path of the Elvis biography – Elvis himself is stunningly brought to life by Austin Butler, who according to a “Trivia” post on imdb.com won the part after his mother died when he was in his 20’s (as Elvis’s own mother did) and he paid tribute to her by filming a test scene of Elvis singing “Unchained Melody” (which provides a stunning ending to the film) – though there are some odd lapses. For one thing, one of Elvis’s doctors is shown preparing an injection for him. It’s not totally beyond the realm of possibility, but it seems unlikely given the elaborate rationalizations Elvis created around his drug use. Elvis, according to Elvis, never took “drugs.” Everything he did take came in a little amber bottle with a doctor’s name on it, and one of the lines Elvis drew to separate himself from the hippies he hated was that he would not shoot up. In fact, Elvis’s career and particularly his drug use has a striking parallel to Judy Garland’s; both were started on drugs in the first place to keep their weight down while they were making movies, both spent the first halves of their career making movies and the second half performing live, and both died of overdoses in their 40’s. I’m not sure you could follow the film if you didn’t already have a familiarity with at least the basic facts of Elvis’s life – like Prokofieff’s opera War and Peace, which seems less an adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel and more of a commentary on it, at times Elvis seems more like a commentary on Elvis’s life than an actual telling of it.

At the same time Luhrmann’s script leaves out some of the worst decisions Col. Parker ever made about Elvis’s career, including his decision in the early days of Elvis’s film work to turn down the role of “Lonesome Rhodes” in the Elia Kazan=Budd Schulberg film A Face in the Crowd. Elvis was a huge fan of Marlon Brando and James Dean, and had he known that Kazan, who had directed both Brando and Dean in their star-making movies (A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden, respectively), wanted him for a project, Elvis would almost certainly have leaped at the chance and said, “Where do I sign?” Instead, without telling Elvis it had been offered to him, Col. Parker turned down A Face in the Crowd. The film was eventually made with Andy Griffith, who was great in the role except for one minor detail: he couldn’t sing, and the character was supposed to be a star-quality singer. Had Elvis made A Face in the Crowd, his movie career would have gone off to a prestigious start with a director who could have potentially unleashed his real acting skills. Instead he ended up shoehorned into one formula film after another with stupid scripts and low-quality direction. The only function of Elvis’s movies was to surround him with bikini-clad babes in exotic locales – Elvis himself bitterly referred to one as “my latest travelogue” – and to sell soundtrack albums. In what was an early example of what’s now called “market synergy,” the promotional trailers for Eivls’s films also announced that you could buy an RCA Victor soundtrack album containing the songs he sang in the film.

On occasion Elvis did try to break the mold – in 1960, after he returned from the Army and made a predictable comedy called G. I. Blues, director Don Siegel cast Elvis as a half-white, half-Native in a Western called Flaming Star. Elvis’s singing voice was heard only in a title song over the opening credits and another song, “Cane and a High Starched Collar,” which he sang “live” on set with only his voice and guitar, in the first five minutes. After that he didn’t sing at all, and the studio, 20th Century-Fox, released it with the same promotion as any other Elvis movie instead of announcing that he was making his serious acting debut in the role. The film bombed at the box office – Elvis’s first flop – and Siegel rather bitterly told an interviewer years later that it was because Elvis’s fans had flocked to the movie in its first week of release but after that told their friends, “He doesn’t sing in it after the first five minutes Stay home.” (When my husband Charles and I watched Flaming Star years ago, our assessment was that Elvis was good enough to have played John Wayne or Clint Eastwood roles, but was not at the level of Brando or Dean.)

Perhaps the best sequence in the film is the clash between Elvis, Col. Parker and director Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery), whom the real Parker called “Bindel,” as Tom Hanks does in the film, over the 1968 Singer comeback special. Col. Parker wanted this to be a family show in which Elvis would wear a ghastly red sweater and sing Christmas songs, since the show was scheduled to air around the holiday season. Binder had a quite different vision: he saw the show as a chance to showcase Elvis, explore his musical roots and put him on stage before a live audience. (Elvis had done two concerts in Honolulu in 1961 to raise money for the memorial to the U.S.S. Arizona, one of the major ships sunk by the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but aside from those concerts he hadn’t played live since 1957.) Earlier Binder had directed a legendary telecast called The T.A.M.I. Show (the initials stood for “Teenage Awards Music International,” a name as meaningless as it sounds) in which he had put the Rolling Stones on right after James Brown (with predictable results; the Stones could barely rouse any audience enthusiasm after Brown’s incandescent performance, including wearing a series of increasingly gaudy cloaks and writhing on the floor in a gesture Brown had learned from attending Black church revivals as a boy), and Binder and Parker warred over their competing visions for how to use the show to revitalize Elvis’s career. In a scene that didn’t make it into the movie but certainly could have, Binder took Elvis out on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. in 1968 and, to Elvis’s shock, no one recognized him.

Binder’s vision for the show included putting Elvis in a black leather suit, reuniting him with his original band from the Sun days, and as a finale having him sing a song called “If I Can Dream” that at least vaguely hinted at the convulsions tearing the U.S. apart in 1968, especially the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy and the continuing trauma of the Viet Nam war. The film makes Col. Parker’s role seem nastier than it really was. At one point Luhrmann’s script suggests that Col. Parker arranged to have Elvis drafted in 1958 because he was worried about the calls to ban him from TV and figured the best way to re-establish his image as a clean-cut all-American boy would be to have him serve a stint in the Army. (After Elvis died someone was able to reach John Lennon and ask for a comment; Lennon said, “Elvis didn’t die last week. He died the day he went into the Army.”) While Elvis was stationed in Germany, his mother Gladys (Helen Thomson) visited him just before her own death and expressed concern that the heavy noise of cannon fire Elvis was being exposed to would ruin his hearing – and when Elvis returned to live performing a decade later he became notorious for having the loudest monitor speakers (the speakers that point away from the audience so the musicians can hear themselves) of anybody in the business. There are a lot of bizarre Elvis anecdotes that didn’t make it into Luhrmann’s film – including the story that when Elvis’s mother died while he was still in the service, he was given a bereavement leave to go home and attend her funeral, and he literally fondled her feet and told his friends about his mother’s “pretty little sooties.”

One of the most telling anecdotes was told in the book by Larry Geller, Elvis’s hairdresser and spiritual advisor. (Only in Hollywood could someone combine those two jobs.) Geller recalled that in 1965, when Elvis recorded a gospel album called How Great Thou Art, Elvis specifically wanted the record mixed so his voice would be the lead singer in a gospel quartette. Instead, without asking him, either Col. Parker, someone in his entourage or someone at RCA Victor had the album remixed so Elvis’s voice would be front and center the way it was on all his other albums. Elvis was furious when he actually heard the album, but when Geller told him he should demand that the record company change it and release the mix he had wanted, Elvis shrugged his shoulders and said, “There’s nothing I can do about it.” I immediately thought of how differently Frank Sinatra would have reacted if one of his records had been remixed without his knowledge or consent. Sinatra would have threatened to have everyone in the record company fired, and he might even have alluded to his alleged Mafia connections and darkly hinted, “And if you don’t change it back, I might just call some of my special friends and have you taken out!” I think that at some point Elvis realized that he’d been turned into a commodity, someone who neither had artistic control nor would have known how to use his power to fight for it, and that’s the source of what I’ve called “the Elvis perplex”: how much potential talent the man had, how little of it he actually used,and how huge a star he became on the basis of that little.

One thing that really bothered me about the film Elvis was the curious and strange accent Tom Hanks used to play him. Yes, I know that “Thomas Andrew Parker” wasn’t his real name; he was born Andreas van Kuijk in Breda, The Netherlands on June 28, 1909 (during his life Parker acknowledged his birth date but claimed he’d been born in Huntington, West Virginia), and the weird voice Hanks uses throughout the movie seems to have been his attempt at a Dutch accent. Only interview clips exist of the real Col. Parker, notably one from the ABC-TV news show Nightline on August 15, 1987 commemorating the 10th anniversary of Elvis’s death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djd2bmm6nWE), and whatever his actual origins, the voice you hear on that clip is credible as an American Southerner. I don’t think anyone would have accepted Parker as a Southern American if he’d actually spoken the way Hanks does in this film; though they may not have specifically identified the voice as Dutch, they would certainly have “read” it as foreign! This is especially curious since one of the major plot points of the film is that Elvis needed to tour outside the U.S. and received huge offers to do so, but Col. Parker turned them down because he’d been an undocumented immigrant all those years ago and he feared not being allowed back into the U.S. if he left with Elvis on a tour. A surprisingly compelling YouTube documentary on Col. Parker, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik7HAqR1AmY, says this was nonsense; the Colonel had powerful friends in the U.S. government, including Lyndon Johnson, and LBJ surely could have got through a bill making the Colonel a U.S. citizen if the Colonel had asked him to. Overall, Elvis is a good movie – as the title character, Austin Butler is fabulous and totally convincing (ironically, this actor who shot to fame playing a rock star is going to play Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in the upcoming sequel to Dune; in the original film of Dune this part was played by a real rock star, Sting) – and with a more restrained director, a script that made more sense even to the Elvis-uninitiated, and Tom Hanks speaking in Col. Parker’s real voice instead of the weird one he concocted for the film, this could have been a whole lot better.