ELVIS IN PICTURES

I’ve had Elvis on the brain lately. And no, it’s not because I’ve spotted him in disguise at the mall or the grocery store. He’s been absent even in the tabloids, currently rife with the antics of Kardashians, NFL players, Bieber and that ilk. What brings Elvis in range on my sonar is The Identical, the new box-office dud whose story was “inspired” by Elvis Presley’s real life. Then lo and behold! Two movies, long out-of-print, have recently popped up on Blu-ray — one a 1981 semi-documentary called This Is Elvis and the other, perhaps Elvis’s oddest movie ever, Follow That Dream (1962), in which he plays a Gomer Pyle-type character. During filming for that flick on location near Gainesville, the rock-and-roller met a kid named Tom Petty, and the rest is musical genius history.
I got to thinking about Elvis and the movies. Between 1956 and 1969, he appeared in 31 feature films, the leading man in all of them but the first, Love Me Tender. The documentaries and biopics started shortly after his August 1977 death, and have never let up. Nor have the films inspired by Elvis the Cultural Phenomenon — like 3000 Miles to Graceland (2001) with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russell as Elvis impersonators, Heartbreak Hotel (1988) about Elvis being kidnapped, Elvis Meets Nixon, a ’97 TV mockumentary, or Elvis and the Beauty Queen, an ’81 TV movie with Don Johnson as The King.
A 2011 article in The Hollywood Reporter listed four projects about Elvis in current development. Only one of them, alas, has made it to the big screen, and that, unfortunately, is The Identical. The others are still percolating; the article concluded that a rash of Elvis movies was/is on the horizon.
One of the best portrayals of Elvis was also one of the earliest, with Kurt Russell playing the singer/songwriter/megastar in a 1979 TV movie helmed by horror director John Carpenter between Halloween (’78) and The Fog (’80). Russell nails Elvis; he went on to star in four more Carpenter films, including his groundbreaking remake of The Thing and Escape from New York. Ironically, Russell’s very first film appearance (at the age of 10) was in the 1963 Elvis flick, It Happened at the World’s Fair.
My favorite Elvis impersonation is by horror icon Bruce Campbell in Don Coscarelli’s inspired 2002 gem, Bubba Ho-Tep. Based on Joe R. Lansdale’s short story, it’s the “true” story of what happened to Elvis when, depressed about his celebrity lifestyle, he traded places with an impersonator who is the one who really died at Graceland. Now confined to an East Texas home for the elderly, a grumpy, bed-ridden eccentric Elvis broods about the past and what might have been. He’s stirred out of his self-pity by a fellow inmate (Ossie Davis) who claims to be JFK, and the two old men join forces to battle an Egyptian mummy/death-spirit that’s claimed the nursing home as its feeding ground.
In his best role, Campbell (The Evil Dead) is great; funny and at the same time sympathetic, his speech patterns and gestures a perfect mimicry of Presley in his decline, which turns out also to be his moment of greatest triumph. Bubba Ho-Tep closes with Campbell delivering Elvis’ signature sign-off. It’s a perfect ending to a terrific movie, befitting the King himself.