Peter Viney's Blog

Elvis

2022

Directed by Baz Lurrmann

Story by Bax Lurhmann and Jeremy Doner
Screenplay by Baz Lurhmnn, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner

CAST (PARTIAL)

Austin Butler- Elvis Presley
Tom Hanks – Colonel Tom Parker

With

Olivia DeJonge – Priscilla Presley
Helen Thomson  – Gladys Presley, Elvis’s mother
Richard Roxburgh – Vernon Presley, Elvis’s father
Kelvin Harrison Jnr-B.B. King
David Wenham – Hank Snow
Kodi Smit-McPhee – Jimmie Rodgers Snow
Luke Bracey- Jerry Schilling
Dacre Montgomery – Steve Binder
Leon Ford – Tom Diskin
Gary Clark Jnr- Arthur Big Boy Crudup
Yola – Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Xavier Samuel- Scotty Moore
Adam Dunn – Bill Black
Alton Mason – Little Richard
Shannon Sanders- Pentacostal preacher / singer
Josh McConville- Sam Phillips
Chaydon Jaye- Young Elvis
Mike Bingaman – Sonny West
Christian McCarthy- Red West
Tony Nixon – Dr Nick

In my early teens, the divide was Cliff Richard or Elvis Presley. I was too young to have been an early Elvis fan. I met him through kids three years or more older than me at youth club, with Elvis’s Golden Records. All my friends were on the Cliff Richard side. I was instantly on the Elvis side.

Watching the film brought back memories. We have a photo of ourselves at Graceland. We recognised the apartment block where young Elvis lived. In 2014 at least, you could pay to sleep in his old bedroom ($250?).  I definitely don’t believe the film narrative that it was a racially-mixed block in 1953 either. That Memphis tour showed that Johnny Cash was much better off pre-fame than Elvis was. Yes, I stood on the X on the floor at Sun Studios, held a precious microphone, which I struggled to believe Elvis really had used, and had my photo taken holding it, but then I have the same belief problem with religion. Yes, Beale Street on a Saturday night is still lively, except you now have to go through security scanners to check you have no concealed weapons to enter the street. The Saturday we were there, a dance started with a dozen African-Americans, and after thirty minutes there must have been a hundred, dancing in lines to records from the 60s.  We’ve seen the airplane Lisa Marie. We’ve walked the hallowed halls of Graceland, marvelled at the grotesque decor. We’ve stood at his grave. We’ve seen the blue suede shoes, which are much greyer a blue than I had expected. And sorry but  Blue Suede Shoes appears in the film at a date earlier than Carl Perkins wrote it. I know this stuff.

I remember when Elvis died too. On the Mondays when new students arrived at the language school where I worked, I’d give a four o’clock ‘lecture’ (actually an entertainment) to 250 of those already there, which was on popular music with songs, while the new arrivals were assigned classes and given welcome talks. I was due to do Simon & Garfunkel, or perhaps Dylan Part III the following Monday, but Peggy, the administrative assistant to my boss (then we would have said ‘secretary’), told me most firmly that I should do Elvis instead. The next day she brought in her stack of LPs and I spent Sunday choosing and taping the selections. I felt guilty doing the talk on the Monday . It seemed exploitative. (I did it several times afterwards too).

I have pretty much every single, EP and LP. I’ve read the books too. We’ve used His Latest Flame and Return To Sender in ELT textbooks.

THE FILM

It’s all seen and narrated by an elderly and dying Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks with prosthetics all over and a weird accent. The story is always via his eyes. We know he was the villain. He was not a colonel. His first name was not Tom. His surname was not Parker. It all comes out. He was probably Dutch, and an illegal immigrant which is why he never allowed Elvis to leave the country. Parker probably did not have a passport. They don’t mention the rumour that Parker fled to America after being accused of murder.

The way Parker draws Elvis into his web dominates the early sequences. He’s not interested in Elvis, he’s watching the reaction of women to Elvis. This is more explicit than it might have been in 1955. He doesn’t know or care what Elvis does. He just knows the results.You don’t need to be an erudite Bible scholar to get the parallels as Tom Parker sweet talks Elvis at the top of a Ferris Wheel.

 Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;

The Gospel According to Matthew 4:8, King James Bible

Elvis is a mother’s boy. You have to know the story to be aware that he’s a surviving twin, with his brother Aaron dying at birth. There are references to him being two sons in one, but our teenage companions missed them. Parker gets around Gladys and Vernon, appointing Vernon as’Business Manager.’

We know the tragedy is that this crooked old carnival showman did not understand the music at all, and put Elvis in increasingly poor movies. The supply of decent songs dried up totally, as the likes of Lieber and Stoller became established and declined to cut in Elvis Presley Enterprises for 50% of the song writing and publishing any longer. As receipts fell, the films had lower and lower budgets and appalling scripts. In fact bad songs came early in the film sequence … Wooden Heart from G.I. Blues may be the worst song Elvis ever recorded.

Parker was addicted to gambling, in hock to the Mafiosi who owned Las Vegas, which is why he forced Elvis to work there to pay off his debts. When Elvis decided to leave him, Parker produces a notebook and presents Elvis with a bill for $8 million. It starts ‘Gasoline to Louisiana Hayride, 1954, $1.25.’ This rings true to me. On the road in 1970, bands had to write down at motorway stops, ‘Bill- tea 5d. Mike- coffee 6d. Alan – tea plus slice of cake 11d.’ This information went to management, who would tot it all up (they were ‘advances’) for the day when the band started to make a profit and they could reclaim it. I can fully believe Parker did the same.

There’s a lot of humour early on, particularly in the gobsmacked reactions of holy Hank Snow (played by David Wenham) to Elvis.

This film is the Gospel According to Priscilla. Priscilla Presley and Lisa Marie Presley control the estate. Nothing was going to get made without their approval. (See also Get Back and The Beatles. That had to be passed by Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison). Hence the rather long ending here on how  heartbroken Elvis was by her departure and his final protestation of love, and not a whiff of her leaving with the karate instructor. Nor mentioning that she was fourteen when she started dating Elvis.

There are seamier bits than the film deigned to show. This is a guy who apparently died of a heart attack while trying to pass a stool while constipated by opiate drugs. They skip that. They skip the final female companion.

Elvis’s early 1960s output is always overlooked, here almost totally. We hear Can’t Help Falling in Love (from Blue Hawaii ) in different versions throughout. We hear Viva Las Vegas, one of the best of the film music songs. Otherwise no. The critical leap is from pre-army to the 1968 NBC TV Special, ignoring all in between. They’re skipping some of the very best songs … His Latest Flame / Little Sister might be his best double-sided single. Return to Sender. Devil in Disguise. These are all 45s I bought new. Elvis was producing great material then.

Austin Butler is not a direct lookalike. In a way he’s enough like Elvis to make the actual differences (he’s slighter in build) mildly annoying. If anything, with his face, he would be great at playing a young John Travolta. That might be a job for the future.  If they’d been able to make such a movie by the early 80s (impossible as Colonel Parker was alive), Travolta would have made a good Elvis on looks, acting and dancing. While Travolta had two UK number ones with Olivia Newton-John,  You’re The One That I Want and Summer Nights his light voice would not have worked. He could not have got anywhere near singing it.

The soundtrack is complex. Sometimes it’s Elvis’s voice. Sometimes it’s Austin Butler’s voice. Sometimes they’re mixed within the same song. It’s Austin Butler for some big face-on production numbers. No one can sing exactly like Elvis, though plenty have made a career as Elvis imitators. I saw Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana in Southampton, working with a Welsh band fronted by a very good Elvis imitator. Every time Scotty Moore did the guitar solo in Heartbreak Hotel the applause was deafening, whereupon he repeated the solo. He must have played it a dozen times. On which, we definitely don’t see enough of Scotty, D.J Fontana and Bill Black in the film. They get odd lines, but the relationship of the band in the early days was worth exploring.

Butler gives a phenomenal performance, particularly in physical movement. When we get to Elvis starting the shows in Las Vegas, he twitches and shakes even more than Elvis ever did, making it obvious that it was all amphetamine fuelled.

I’m (tw)itchin’ like a man in a fuzzy tree
My friends say I’m actin’ wild as a bug

All Shook Up

The thesis is that the young Elvis watched Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup singing That’s Alright iin a corrugated iron shed, Sister Rosetta Tharpe at a gospel tent revival and Big Mama Thornton singing Hound Dog. I don’t know if they’re factually true (I doubt it), but they do have a spiritual level of truth.

There are the appearances of Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jnr), who I can’t imagine as that young, but that’s a later reaction, and I’d never heard of Elvis being advised on the music business by B.B. King. There’s a really show stopping appearance by Alton Mason playing Little Richard which is supposed to show how Elvis got his stage moves, uniting country and black music, except we’d seen him doing them earlier..

Blue Suede Shoes isn’t the only song out of sequence. Elvis (or rather Butler) sings Trouble powerfully in 1956 and gets himself carted off and banned. The lyrics are absolutely right for the story, it’s one of the best bits, but the song was written in 1958 and is in King Creole. However, using songs which are appropriate to the story, but outside their actual place chronologically is standard in modern movies. It’s a Lurhmann speciality, and it doesn’t matter to normal viewers, just to anally-retentive pedantic music fans like me.

The film jumps from Elvis singing Trouble just down the road from a segregation politician in 1956 to the Colonel wanting to put him in the army to get the press off his back. They skip his two or three most successful years when he had a rapid succession of number one hit records. In this movie, the Colonel plots Elvis’s film career as a move AFTER Elvis is conscripted and about to go off to Germany in the army. Bollocks, to put it mildly. Elvis had already done Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole BEFORE he joined the army.

Forget chronology for a moment. The visual accuracy of the film is demonstrated best in the 1968 NBC Special sequence. We prepared for the film by watching the original the night before. Look at the girls around the stage in the film, the clothes, the hair, even the faces and expressions. It’s uncanny how carefully they replicated it.

This NBC TV ‘Comeback’ special is well documented. Elvis subverted the Colonel’s plans and did his thing. In the movie, the filming is interrupted by the assassination of Robert Kennedy which took place on 6 June 1968, and we assume a Christmas special would have been recorded months ahead. In the film, Elvis watches the news footage between songs, and that assassination inspires If I Can Dream. The Special was filmed 27 the June – 30^th June, as my de luxe box set and IMDB state. I’d guessed this watching, because I remember the Robert Kennedy assassination and the date. So he did not watch the murder during filming the Special. What is true is that the song was commissioned from Walter Earl Brown for the special, and by Elvis to replace I’ll Be Home For Christmas. Brown knew of Elvis’s admiration for Martin Luther King, and that Elvis was shocked by that assassination so close to home in Memphis. The song WAS intended to invoke memories of Dr King’s I have a dream speech, and it figures that the Robert Kennedy assassination inspired Elvis to ask for the song. 

The issue in the Special was the Colonel’s deal with sponsors for Christmas songs and Christmas sweaters and it makes the best part of the movie. It’s not exactly true though … Elvis did agree in the end to finish with Blue Christmas.

Elvis’s political awareness is played right up to the point of invention. The incident when he went to the Oval Office in full regalia and asked President Nixon to campaign against druggy hippies is certainly lost. There are photos. 

It’s full of memorable performances. I tired of Tom Hanks’ Colonel shuffling around slot machines between his more interesting scenes, but he’s Tom Hanks. The good scenes are great. Austin Butler on-stage moves and his performances of the big numbers gives an award-winning performance. Suspicious Minds stands out. Baz Lurhmann’s direction, as ever, brings a vibrant film. Archive sequences are cunningly mixed in, using collage to equate film quality You can’t blow that old newsreel film up to a modern screen, but you can put them in split-screen collages.When Lurhmann gets to Vegas the big stage senes are huge … but that’s exactly what they were. I loved the shots of Elvis directing the band for his intro music.

In the final, Unchained Melody (perhaps the last song I’d have chosen) Austin Butler morphs into film of the real Elvis.In The Ghetto (which surely should have featured in the main film) plays mixed with rap over the credits.

We took two late teens who knew next to nothing about Elvis. It’s a long film at two hours 40 minutes. We asked if it felt long. ‘It felt about an hour,’ said one.

So the music, the performances and the story all worked brilliantly. We loved it.

Think of it as Elvis for Beginners. Elvis 101. It’s entertaining to watch and listen to. It’s not the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Go on and explore more. The music. The ELVIS-Comeback Special. Youtube.

LINK:
My review on Around and Around:

SPEEDWAY (AND ELVIS FILM MUSIC)

To finish, check out a song about Elvis by Mark Germino. It’s not on YouTube.

Fire in The Land of Grace.

It has a lot of truth about the Elvis Story / Myth.