All That Ken Burns

For my part, when I hear the words ”American Trilogy,“ I reach for my copy of Aloha From Hawaii -- Via Satellite. Elvis! In the world according to Jazz, Elvis is the enemy, but in the documentary Elvis: That’s the Way It Is -- Special Edition, world-premiering this month on Turner Classic Movies, he‘s just the King of Rock & Roll® (as the TCM press kit has it) -- or perhaps more correctly the Sun King of Rock & Roll, what with his big-collared, plunging-necklined, rhinestoned jumpsuits. ”If the songs don’t go over,“ he says before opening at the International Hotel, ”we can do a medley of costumes.“ It is 1970, and the then-35-year-old Presley, recently returned to live performance, is back in Vegas. Cary Grant‘s there. Norm Crosby’s there. At the time, as I dimly recall it, this didn‘t look like rock & roll at all, it looked corny and sounded fat and old and MOR, but Elvis after all was constitutionally conservative (which is why, finally, he could be so popular); that he had ever looked like a rebel had more to do with his being sexy white trash with a shaky leg than with having a taste for revolution. The sincerity and depth of his late period have become clearer with time.

Produced by Rick Schmidlin, who was also in charge of reconstructionsrevisions of von Stroheim’s Greed and Welles‘ Touch of Evil, the Special Edition is not an elaboration of the 1970 original film so much as a wholesale recut; 45 percent of the picture is new (though this version is in fact slightly shorter), and the emphasis is on the music rather than on, as before, the event, the fans, the hoopla. As a concert film, it’s no Stop Making Sense, but for the student of Elvis, and of the fashions and hairstyles of 1970, it‘s pretty damn fascinating, and the music’s mostly good. (He runs through the old chestnuts as fast as he can, but gives the new material, even the bad new material, his fist-clenched, full-chested, sweaty-browed, modified-karate-crouch all.) Examples abound as well of the famed Presley wit: scaring a backup singer onstage, interpolating the line ”shove it up your nose“ into ”Suspicious Minds.“ The minutiae of his life being widely known does not make Elvis any less a mysterious presence -- it‘s a case of not being able to see the person for the tabloids -- and one searches such a film as this for clues to the Real Him. About all we learn, or are reminded of, is that he liked to sing, which is maybe all we need to know. Lucky he was good at it.