Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Baz Luhrmann directs his first feature in nine years, Elvis. Elvis being Elvis, this isn't even the first film about Elvis simply titled Elvis.

In a certain weird way, it's entirely possible we would have seen a very different career for iconic horror director John Carpenter if he hadn't directed the 1979 telefilm Elvis, a biopic of the iconic rock legend Elvis Presley It came at a crucial point in his career, after an extremely productive 1978, which saw the release of the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (adapted from a spec script he wrote), as well as the production and release of two movies about murderous men with knives stalking women, the legendary Halloween (shot in May and released in October), and his first television film, Someone's Watching Me! (shot in April and aired in November). Halloween, in particular, was a major success (it may have had the highest return on investment in film history up to that point) with an enormous positive impact on Carpenter's career that could hardly have been imagined at the time he signed up to direct Elvis, which was in the middle of its production when Halloween opened. So all in all, very exciting times for the young director, very career-making times, the times when every single choice is going to open one set of doors and close a different set.

In hindsight, it's a very weird moment for Carpenter to have directed Elvis, which is by virtually any measure I can imagine the biggest outlier in his entire career (most obviously, it's his only project in neither the horror nor science-fiction genres). But it mattered a great deal to his development as a filmmaker: he learned something very important from making it. Specifically, he learned that he never, ever wanted to make a film this way for the rest of his career. He basically wasn't involved with post, not overseeing the edit nor involving himself with the music (since the great majority of the music was new covers of Elvis Presley songs performed by soundalike Ronnie McDowell, it's hard to say what his involvement there would have consisted of anyways), and as a result, he has basically had nothing kind to say about the film in all the decades since, regarding it as essentially just a mistake that he's since outgrown, something that taxed his creativity not at all, and which he accordingly treated without putting in any but the most rudimentary.

Well, who am I to disagree with a talented director I admire as much as John Carpenter? Elvis is a pretty banal piece of work, alright, and it's hard to imagine any scenario in which it wouldn't be. The film came out less than two years after Presley died at a mere 42 years of age, having worn his body down hard in the last few years of his life through pills and unhealthy diet, it was broadcast on network television, and it was made by Dick Clark's production company. None of those conditions were particularly conducive to telling a story that was in any way interested in creating a dramatically complicated version of the singer's life. People were going to want a warm and friendly celebration of Elvis Aaron Presley, beloved singing icon, and that's exactly what Carpenter and writer-producer Anthony Lawrence provided: an untroubled exercise in printing the legend, making Elvis seem like the biggest sweetheart and Extremely Good Boy that you could ever hope to run into.

There's nothing "wrong" with this instinct to heal the hearts of (and extract advertising dollars from) a grieving nation, but dramatic it ain't. In Lawrence's telling, Elvis's life was essentially just a bunch of stuff that happened, generally without him having to do much to achieve it, and the more stuff happened, the more million-dollar houses he was able to afford. A clear-cut example of how much the film's toothless, fannish approach costs it as an engaging narrative: Elvis ends with his return to live performances at the International Hotel in Las Vegas in 1969. It was a triumphant comeback, we are told - from what? "From general artistic obsolescence brought on by spending a transformative decade for rock and pop music making corny musical movies in Hollywood," is the answer, but Elvis doesn't provide that information. The movie is so hellbent on avoiding any suggestion that Elvis's live was anything but wonderful fairytale successes and happiness where he made music that people loved and lavished money on all his friends and family, it can't even bring itself to suggest, however slightly, that he was seen as an old-fashioned has-been for a stretch there. Just about the only thing it permits itself to say is that he's grousing that he can't record the kind of brave new music he likes without the suits at the record label getting in his way.

This smooth, conflict-free approach to the Elvis Presley story was never going to be terrifically interesting, but as a nice little present to the fans, by the fans, maybe it could have been painless. Unfortunately, Elvis was scheduled to fit a four-hour slot on February 11, 1979, a big Sunday night extravaganza (ABC scheduled it against showings of blockbuster movies on the other two networks: Gone with the Wind on CBS, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on NBC. Elvis won the night), and when you take out the commercial breaks, you're still left with two hours and 50 minutes of almost pure anti-drama. Plus, it occasionally revs up to some apparent setback to whoosh us into the commercial breaks, only to have skipped past the resolution to that setback by the time we get back in. It is an exhausting sit even at "only" a bit less than three hours, with almost nothing happening but nice little anecdotes about Elvis's life: here's how he recorded his first single at Sun Records. Here's how he made his first (and only) appearance on the Grand Ole Opry. Here's how he bought Graceland. Here's how he met Priscilla Beaulieu (Season Hubley), and had a nice chaste chat with her all night (the subsequent torment of their divorce happens after the movie ends). Here's how he reluctantly took a leap forward in his career thanks to the smart but unsentimental management of Colonel Tom Parker (Pat Hingle), who only shows up a handful of times to be good at his job and not mismanage the Presley fortune into a goddamn Ragnarok of debts and bad deals. Which I think they already knew about in '79, though maybe not the full extent. But again, no bad vibes here. Just trivial "every biopic ever" anecdotes, only buffed clean of even the "our hero has one grave problem to overcome" structure that biopics of this and earlier eras, with their tendency toward squeaky-clean whitewashing, tended to prefer.

It's all sleepy as hell, and Carpenter is doing almost nothing to make it interesting, other than rely on wider shot scales than anything slightly like the TV norms of 1979. There's just one real saving grace, which is Kurt Russell's performance as Elvis. If it was an interesting time in Carpenter's career, it was a downright critical time in Russell's: at 27 years old, with some half of his life and virtually all of his professional career having been spent as a Walt Disney contract player, the actor was quickly getting old enough that even "aging child start who's having a tough time managing the turn out of juvenile roles" was failing to work as an excuse, and he needed to prove himself. Being a big Elvis fan himself (plus, his film debut was a small appearance in an Elvis vehicle, 1963's It Happened at the World's Fair), he had a pretty solid Elvis impersonation, one that captured Presley's extremely distinctive mushmouthed speaking voice and lanky body carriage without pushing into the campy excess of e.g. a Las Vegas Elvis impersonator. It was enough to get him the job, anyway (and a few Elvish-adjacent roles subsequently), and then it was just a matter of giving the best performance he possibly could in a movie that was enormously reliant on his screen presence. Since it's over four decades later and I can say "Kurt Russell" and you know who I mean, it's no surprise to report that he did, in fact, have that performance; quite literally the only thing in Elvis that works is Russell's work reducing the icon back to the status of feeling human being.

It's not a biopic performance for the ages, because you can often see Russell's work laid bare right in front of the camera, especially during the musical performances, where he's got to worry about lip-sync on top of the added physicality of Presley's legendary swiveling hips. But it's clearly the best thing the film has going for it, and he does sound and move a lot like Elvis, even if he doesn't really look right. Neither the script nor most of his co-stars are really supporting his efforts to make a more feeling, humane Elvis, though Shelley Winters's showcase role as the singer's mother Gladys at least gives him one strong screen partner, and their unhealthily codependent relationship (not really recognised by the movie as such) is the strongest human thread of the whole thing.

One strong - not even great, just strong - performance is hardly enough to compensate for all the other things Elvis has going wrong. But it's not all doom and gloom. For one thing, Carpenter and Russell got along well enough to decide to collaborate again, and just two years later they'd make their first theatrical feature together, Escape from New York. And thus we were graced with one of the 1980s' very best director/actor pairings. For another thing... well, Carpenter learned his lesson, and never took on such a thoroughly ill-fitting make-work project again. "At least there's not another one of these" isn't much for praise to end a review on, but it's really all that Elvis earns.

Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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