EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12A, 90 mins)
Next year it will be half a century since Elvis Presley died, aged just 42, desperately bloated and full of prescription drugs.
Had director-producer Baz Luhrmann waited another 12 months before releasing this spectacular documentary, the poignancy of the 50th anniversary would have added some useful marketing muscle.
But Luhrmann didn’t want to wait that long – and when you see this film, with its handy EPiC acronym, you will understand why.
Moreover, although it focuses on the early 1970s, just a few years before his sad demise, it has nothing to do with Elvis in death. On the contrary, it shows him at his most extravagantly, exuberantly alive.
At last week’s UK premiere, Luhrmann explained how the project came about. While preparing for his excellent 2022 biopic Elvis – which starred Austin Butler in the title role, with Tom Hanks as a decidedly sinister Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s controlling manager – he unearthed no fewer than 65 boxes of unseen Las Vegas concert footage. They were buried deep in salt mines in Kansas, which is where Warner Bros keep their archives.
Did anything so joyous ever come out of a salt mine? The negatives were on the point of perishing, and there was no sound, so Luhrmann, with editor Jonathan Redmond and other specialists, had a pile of work still to do.
But with the help of director Peter Jackson, whose team had done a similar job with reams of old Beatles material, the footage was restored and the original sound found and synched.
At the same time, Luhrmann discovered a dusty old audiotape of Elvis talking with unusual candour about his extraordinary life. That went into the mix, too.
Director-producer Baz Luhrmann’s ‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’ opened in IMAX this week
Next year it will be half a century since Elvis Presley died, aged just 42, desperately bloated and full of prescription drugs
The film focuses on the early 1970s, just a few years before his sad demise – but it has nothing to do with Elvis in death
The result is riveting, and won’t leave only diehard Elvis fans all shook up.
Anyone with even a passing interest will surely be spellbound both by his on-stage charisma, which we all knew about, and his profound musicality, which in truth had passed some of us by. The fusion of both makes for quite a spectacle.
A wondrous performance of Suspicious Minds ends with a drum solo that Elvis positively inhabits, quivering like a religious fundamentalist possessed by divine ecstasy.
Admittedly, this is not a warts-and-all portrayal, almost defiantly so. Luhrmann intersperses the concert footage with older archive clips, but there are no suggestions of any impropriety in his wooing of the (very) young Priscilla, no hints of his burgeoning addictions. This is above all an unabashed, effervescent celebration of a star seemingly still in his physical and artistic prime, who wants to please his audience, not challenge them.
When he remarks politely at a press conference that he prefers to keep to himself his thoughts about the war in Vietnam – ‘I’m just an entertainer, I’d rather not say’ – we are evidently meant to applaud his modesty. Certainly, his restraint stands in stark contrast with all those today who turn their public platforms into soap boxes.
An end-caption informs us that between 1969 and 1977 Elvis performed in Vegas well over 1,000 times. Plainly, that insane workload came at a price, and in the interview he says as much, talking about his sense of isolation even in the middle of a crowd. Hardly anyone knew that it was Elvis himself who was lonesome tonight.
We also hear him ruefully wishing he had toured the UK, an ambition clobbered by Tom Parker. We don’t see much of Parker here, but when we do, the track playing over the clips is deliberately mischievous: You’re The Devil In Disguise.
On the whole, though, this film is about the Vegas years – on stage and off – with Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jnr among those seen paying after-show homage to the singer.
The film is riveting – and won’t leave only diehard Elvis fans all shook up. Pictured: Elvis strums a guitar backstage
A wondrous performance of Suspicious Minds ends with a drum solo that Elvis positively inhabits
It’s glorious to find that another audience, nearly 50 years on from his death, can still be electrified by Elvis
‘You started to rev up and you never stopped,’ marvels Davis, no slouch in the stagecraft department.
That period in Elvis’s career is sometimes written off as little more than a riot of kitsch. It’s true that if he had been in decline by then, it would be legitimate to poke fun at the gaudy rhinestone suits, the huge upright collars worthy of a visiting alien prince, the gigantic rings, the sideburns like carpet samples.
But we know now that he was actually better than ever.
At last week’s premiere, Luhrmann got a thunderous round of applause when he told us there wasn’t a single frame of AI in his film, and that ‘the only visual effect is the effect you see Elvis having on his audience’.
It’s rather glorious to find that another audience, 49 years after his death, can still be electrified by the king of rock ‘n’ roll.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert opened in IMAX yesterday, and is in cinemas nationwide from next Friday.
