Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...camera crew, armed with Metrocolor and Panavision, off to Vegas. Denis Sanders, who had recently won an Oscar for a documentary entitled Czechoslovakia, 1968, was sent along to direct; Lucien Ballard, an old hand at composing stunning Western visuals, was put in charge of cinematography. Assignment: Get Elvis, on film, for a Thanksgiving distribution date...
Unwittingly, however, Elvis is also a telling documentary about the packaging of the night club "artist" for cinematic consumption. When Peter Watkins made a film called Privilege, the story of the rise of a British rock idol, a few years ago, he stole directly from an American short called lonely Boy a brilliant little glimpse of the early Paul Apka surrounded by the demands of the night club world. Elvis has the same look of fictionalized reality...
...never see much of what should have gone into the film. Elvis manager, Colonel Parker, never appears. Elvis' rehearsals are staged (There is none of the drama or professionalism ? saw in Pennchaker's recent study of the recording of the Broadway cast album of Company ) and Elvis' actual performance is interrupted for so many secondary investigations that we never get a sense of its tensions and tempos...
Instead, the film offers a selfreflective study of how a performer operates when conscious that his every move is being recorded for the fans. Elvis mugs shamelessly, pathetically. He points to one of his back-up men and laughs. "You can't use those words, man. They'll put an X-rating right across your big mouth." "Don't mind the cameras," he tells his audience, then does exactly the opposite...
...each arriving celebrity. "Julie Prowse." "Mrs. Xavier Cougart." Exactly like a herald announcing the nobility to the court. Whereupon each celebrity turns, smiles, and mumbles something complimentary about Elvis. For its not enough to be Julie Prowse or Mrs. Xavier Cougart, the fact has to be verified on film and applauded by an audience. The camera itself glories in the terrible tyranny it holds over these people...