Near the beginning of This Is Elvis, the nineteen-year-old rockabilly singer Elvis Presley has a ducktail pompadour, long sideburns, and a young, hot redneck swagger; his lids are heavy and his expression is provocative—smoldering, teasing. It’s the mid-fifties, and he gives country music and Negro rhythm-and-blues songs a lightning-bright attack and a frenzied fast beat. You can see his eagerness to shock people and deliver the message: good times, pleasure. His lip curls in a half grin as he gyrates; his sexual energy is like laughter busting out because it can’t be held in anymore. He enjoys the impudence; it’s part of the music—the new part, what’s going to get a generation jumping. By the end of the picture, in 1977, the heavyset, forty-two–year–old celebrity-god Elvis Presley is a gulping, slurring crooner, faltering on the lyrics of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” He wears studded jumpsuits that rival Liberace’s splendor, and waves fingers with rings the size of doorknobs. His head has blown up more than his body; he looks like Nero, and he sweats so much that his face seems to be melting away. There’s no assault or danger or exuberance in his overmilked wailing; he might be just another Las Vegas entertainer singing “My Way” and coming on sincere and humble, if it weren’t for the dissolving face that recalls De Palma’s pop-culture horror movie Phantom of the Paradise.
This Is Elvis is a pop-culture horror movie of a different kind. We witness the transformation of a young whirlwind performer into a bloated druggie with dead eyes, yet the middle-aged audiences at Presley’s latter-day appearances are even more hysterically excited than the young crowds at his early shows. What, exactly, are they shrieking for? It can’t be his bored glissandos; it must be that they’re excited simply to be in the presence of this slick, liquifying idol. After almost a decade of making movies and recording, Presley gave up his highly lucrative movie career in 1968, because he knew it was a betrayal of his music. (He starred in thirty-one movies, which ranged from mediocre to putrid, and just about in that order.) He wanted to get into contact with live audiences again—he wanted to feel good again. And he came back with some startling TV specials: his energy was explosive, and his voice seemed richer and more passionate. He’d grown up. But he was so big a name that live performances meant Las Vegas, Madison Square Garden, the Cow Palace, the Houston Astrodome. By the time he started touring, in 1970, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Vietnam had changed the music scene. He was still the king, but what he stood for was nostalgia for the fifties. He got, basically, his old audience, grown sentimental. He was caught: after all the years of Colonel Tom Parker’s management, he was programmed to sell himself out.
There’s another layer of horror in this movie: the people who assembled it—the executive producer, David L. Wolper, and Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt, who are credited with having written, produced, and directed it, and Colonel Parker, who is credited as technical adviser—don’t give any indication that they’re aware of the difference between the music of the young Elvis and the bland, throbbing tearjerkers that come out of the bloated Elvis; one of the many narrators assures us that whatever Elvis did to himself, his voice was never affected. The movie packagers’ attitude toward him is much like that of three of his bodyguards, who, after being fired, wrote a book exposing him as a bad-tempered pillhead; two of them are interviewed in the movie, and they see him as a man who had it made, who had everything they wanted in the palm of his hand, and so they can’t understand why he couldn’t just be happy. That is basically the “mystery” that Leo and Solt offer up: Why wasn’t Elvis Presley happy with his success? What they show us—when they stick to footage of Elvis himself—is the raw material for a movie about a singer with a superabundance of restless American energy who lost his way and couldn’t, or at least didn’t, find a route back. (Maybe Elvis had become so rich and famous there was no route back.) But we have to fill in the gaps and piece together this story for ourselves. The movie doesn’t deal with Elvis the artist. Leo and Solt don’t give any hint of the effort that the young perfectionist craftsman put into a song to make it his, or of the dozens of takes he did before he was satisfied with a record. And they don’t show the process by which the music was watered down and Elvis became Colonel Parker’s cheesecake movie star, who made as much as thirty-five million dollars a year and was contemptuous of everyone, including himself.
The movie is a monstrosity. Whenever someone announces the creation of a new form—the nonfiction novel or the docudrama or Ralph Bakshi’s innovative animation (which means tracing live action) or, as in the case of This Is Elvis, “the first theatrical movie to tell a story by blending existing footage with historically accurate re-creations”—watch your wallet. The announcement may signify that con artist and artist coexist in the same body and are playing devious games with each other or that, as in the cases of Bakshi and of Leo and Solt, something really scuzzy is going on. This Is Elvis is Elvis Presley and four other guys thrown in to impersonate Elvis at periods of his life the weren’t recorded on film, and the voice of a fifth guy, to impersonate Elvis as a narrator; and there are actors impersonating members of the Presley family and other people who figured in his life, and actors supplying voices for those actors in the narration.
The material that Leo and Solt have written and directed—mostly Presley’s childhood and teens—seems insultingly dumb. What the actors and voices dish up is a bunch of inanities, generalities, and—arguably—fabrications. It doesn’t add up to the powerful images of Elvis himself (seen in films, concert footage, TV kinetoscopes, newsreels, and home movies). It takes away. And maybe that’s what it’s meant to do. I’m not suggesting that what is clearly lumpy and inept is actually Machiavellian; what I mean is that the purpose of the “re-creations” is to make Elvis Presley seem an ordinary boy. When the film cuts from the two young Elvis impersonators to the real Elvis, at nineteen, singing to a crowd, there’s a charge in his face and body, and there’s something blanked out from us—sealed off. This isn’t the later version of the innocuous kid we’ve been watching. The re-creations try to turn Presley into much less than he was, so that movie audiences will more readily identify with him. They deny Elvis his singularity, his drive, and his tragedy.
He’s too strong for them, though. There’s an authentic mystery about him: when we see footage from his early Hollywood movies, he’s only a kid of twenty-one or -two, yet he has the zonked eyes of his later years and he seems to be alive only from the waist down. He walks through his starring roles with his face somnolent and masked; you don’t have a clue as to what he’s thinking. (He was a terrible actor. He must have understood that he would never amount to diddly in these crum-bum movies, and been resentful and bored.) At twenty-three, he was inducted into the Army, and the newsreel footage of him being given a G.I. haircut and during the two years of his service (1958 to 1960) shows him more open-faced than at any other time. The sneering, Greek-statue look he had in his movies disappears; he’s leaner, and his smile is boyish. But as soon as he’s out of the Army and resumes his movie career, the surly overripeness is back. The mixture in Elvis—part artist, part exhibitionist, part good ol’ boy, part romantic kid, part unknown—could have fused only in pop culture, and it didn’t fuse for long. (Presley’s romanticism is creepy and gothic; his Priscilla, whom he met—and presumably fell in love with—when she was fourteen and he was twenty-four, looks to be his twin. He arranged for her to be brought to live at his mansion and to be educated, and he married her when she turned twenty-one; his actual twin, a boy, died at birth.)
In his seventies performances, wearing huge stiff collars on his bulging neck, and wide, glass-encrusted belts on the heavy, tight fitting matador outfits that seemed designed to swelter him (were they a penance for his flabbiness or a mad attempt to copy Mick Jagger?), he often seems cynical and slugged. The road—the party that never stops—could destroy anybody. Why did he do it? He was obscenely rich and in bad physical condition, and droning out the same songs over and over again must have intensified his weariness. It may be that he felt so empty that the hysteria of the crowds was the only thing he could respond to. Maybe they excited him on the same nostalgic level that he excited them on: they magnetized each other.
Almost everything that Leo and Solt have done to the raw footage makes you cringe. They’ve even got the man singing “And now the end is near” when he’s melting away. But Presley is the star in his life that he never was in his Hollywood movies. He commands the screen, as powerful an image of the artist that loses faith in the audience as Brando. Some people have it all—greatness is in their reach. And they piss it away. It’s overwhelming to see a life spread out on film—especially the life of someone who peaked a couple years after finishing high school, when he still had the look of a white-trash schoolboy sheik. Presley showed the strength to peak again when he quit Hollywood, and then just slid. This Is Elvis is hair-raising because of what Elvis turns into: joyless stardom gives him the look of a mutant.