"Elvis Was a Hero to Most"
I shared some of the Cinephile-Rock shock when Shout! Factory's Shout Select line bugled a new restoration on Blu-ray of the near-3-hour 1979 made-for-hire TV-movie: Elvis — directed by none-other than Master of Horror John Carpenter, who had just achieved brilliant success with his blockbuster of one year prior, Halloween. Supplements on-disc explain the circumstances around the project's genesis.
So: Why Elvis? I mean to ask, not so much, why did Presley receive (or project) the mania specific to his prime, but rather, aside from the gyrating pelvis and backbeat knee-bends: Why Elvis? The black-mascara'd, fairy'ish alien ready to reintroduce (if only subconsciously) a strain of dandyism unique to our American gossamer: a natural outcome following the century's breakthroughs in the novel, poetry, painting, jazz music, and a general avant-garde. The film exists consciously to capitalize not only on "the King"'s 1977 passing but also on the success of 1978's The Buddy Holly Story by Steve Rash.
Carpenter's direction / mise-en-scène in Elvis registers as 'flat' in a good way: Carpenterian straightforwardness, not to a fault. Part of the reason I love John Carpenter comes down to his tendency, or method, of burying the metaphors within the symbols — like, say, in the pleasurable but admittedly demanding works of Wallace Stevens.
The Kurt Russell-starring Elvis is oddly moving, in a way that Baz Luhrmann's recent Elvis vehicle of 2022 can't possibly match given, as it were, the fact that Luhrmann's movie was developed in pure bad faith. Carpenter's version exists now as a picture far superior to the latter-day trash-can Baz-baroque, even on the Russell-level alone: he incarnates the King magnificently, and reminds us just how underrated this performer, a Carpenter fétiche, has been to the mass and cinephile populations over the years. But I could have sworn upon even the opening hour of the film that Russell was doing his own singing vocals, so great is the looping and syncing of the actual and uncanny Ronnie McDowell's belting pitch-perfection.
Let's refresh our minds with a recent photo of Baz Luhrmann, who in one second given the opportunity would make a musical number out of Oswald's assassination at the pistol of Jack Ruby. •
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