Elvis (1979)

March 13, 2025 12:46 PM

[TRAILER] This John Carpenter-directed TV movie covers the life of Elvis Presley (Kurt Russell) from his impoverished childhood to his meteoric rise to stardom to his triumphant conquering of Las Vegas, but stopping there, a completely arbitrary point after which nothing bad happened.

Also starring Shelley Winters, Season Hubley, Bing Russell, Pat Hingle, Melody Anderson, Charles Cyphers, Ellen Travolta, Joe Mantegna, Ed Begley Jr. Also featuring Ronnie McDowell as the singing voice of Elvis.

Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Anthony Lawrence. Executive produced by Dick Clark for ABC Television. Cinematography by Donald M. Morgan. Edited by Christopher Holmes, Ron Moler. Score by Joe Renzetti.

67% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Not currently available via conventional streaming in the US, but it is uploaded in full to the Internet Archive. Check streaming options for your country on JustWatch. If you're a physical media person, there is a nicely restored Blu Ray option from the folks at Shout Factory.

posted by DirtyOldTown (4 comments total)

Carpenter was just a director-for-hire on this TV biopic, which came too soon after Presley's death for anyone to be digging too hard into the difficult questions about his drug addiction and death, much less his grooming/controlling of Priscilla.

Hubley, FWIW, is not only not the right complement in age to Russell's Elvis (who was 24 when he began courting the girl, who was 14), but she's actually three days older than Russell.

This is a breezy, kind of pleasant TV movie biopic, but between chickening out of his darker aspects and McDowell being a soundalike impersonator who nevertheless doesn't at all have the electricity the real Presley had.

There's no real feeling of Carpenter's panache here. Russell is having fun impersonating, but he doesn't really have a path to do much more with this kind of mundane hagiography.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:52 PM on March 13

I recommend Elvis Meets Nixon. Another low-key, low-stakes TV Elvis film that is entertaining. And very obviously filmed in Toronto.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 3:36 PM on March 13

I do feel like Carpenter can't help but just direct everything like a horror movie (bless him). But I think that works here. There's always something lurking in the edges, which works for Presley's story.

I do like Kurt Russell's Elvis here, though. He doesn't disappear into the role but he also makes it his own.

I liked that this basically was like "yeah, Elvis was bisexual ..." and it wasn't really a thing.

I had this on DVD and I shared it with someone. I'm not sure if I got it back. I really only think this is fun if you're a Carpenter completist or an Elvis completist (I know both). It's still a fun time, though.

(And also, clearly, Carpenter shared the good weed with Russell during this so ...)
posted by edencosmic at 5:41 PM on March 13

Carpenter was just a director-for-hire on this TV biopic, which came too soon after Presley's death for anyone to be digging too hard into the difficult questions about his drug addiction and death, much less his grooming/controlling of Priscilla.

I think that they might have been able to talk at least a bit about the drug addiction, since the tell-all book, Elvis: What Happened?, written with the assistance of three ex-members of Elvis' entourage, had come out a few weeks before he died. The fact that Priscilla Presley was supposedly hired to check the script for accuracy may have had some influence on what was eventually shown.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:06 PM on March 13