Danielle Solzman
Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley revisits Elvis Presley’s return to prominence with the 1968 Comeback Special.
The documentary is now streaming on Netflix but it comes over a year after another documentary. Last year’s documentary featured interviews with the special’s director, Steve Binder. It was also timed to the 55th anniversary. A few friends and family are in this one. However, it tends to draw on interviews with fans and other musicians. This does beg the question of just how much more can we add to the Elvis Presley story that we don’t know. The synopsis discusses having unprecedented access to Elvis and Tom Parker’s personal files. You’d think those would have been precedented by now, what with everything there is so far. But even at that, do we really need to go over Elvis’s origin story once again? I feel like we just relived it through Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic.
“The Colonel is summed in one sentence: last year, my boy had a million dollars worth of talent–this year, he has a million dollars. That’s Colonel Tom Parker in a nutshell.” – Bruce Springsteen
Springsteen discusses being excited by Elvis’s music when he was a child. In a way, watching Elvis is the Springsteen origin story. That’s what led the Boss to get his first guitar. It’s not unfair to say that Springsteen fans are thankful. We all have a similar story–mine is after watching The Beatles Anthology and deciding to take up the guitar. But anyway, there’s no disagreement when Springsteen says that “Elvis is fun to watch.” He is.
This documentary spends way too much time leading up to the 1968 special. He got really big in the 50s, served time in the army, and then went onto make way too many formulaic movies. There might be some hit songs on the various soundtracks but many of the movies just were not good. But again, when are we getting to the headliner? I know Elvis made many bad movies because I’ve watched and review quite a few of them. We know that Colonel Parker just wanted to make the Elvis money from music publishing. Wright Thompson points out just how terrible these films are and how they would take as little as three weeks to produce. It’s really depressing when Elvis is singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” on the back of a truck.
Conan O’Brien was able to see how Elvis was so isolated: “If you look at Elvis’s career through much of the 60s, you’re looking at an artist who’s completely isolated from anything that fed him. This is a guy who was performing in front of people–now he’s isolated.”
Oh, yes, The Beatles make their arrival to America in 1964. The British Invasion starts. Conan looks back on February 1964: “There’s just this huge tidal wave. Everything changes–the hair changes, the clothes change. Overnight, The Beatles make everybody irrelevant and then everyone has to catch up.”
Priscilla Presley reminisces about this time in America, mentioning how The Beatles came to their house in Bel Air. “They were just mesmerized by him,” Priscilla recalls. The Beatles were the first musicians that really wrote and played their own music. Until they came along, writers would write and singers/musicians would perform those songs.
The world was changing as Elvis kept on making movies. Other than Colonel Tom Parker and maybe the studios, did anyone really want those films?!? Anyway, the Civil Rights movement was happening. Vietnam grew worse. President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X–all assassinated during the 1960s. Would Elvis use his voice and platform to speak out? That’s where “If I Can Dream” enters the picture during the special. Luhrmann’s biopic touches on it. Interestingly enough, the biopic would be my introduction to this song. It’s Elvis’s way of standing up in the late 1960s.
FINALLY. It takes nearly a full hour of this documentary before starting to touch on the 1968 Comeback Special. It should not take this long to get to the headlining event of the documentary. It’s almost as if they wanted to talk to several talking heads so that they could put context into the special. When they finally get to this point, it’s a mixture of clips and interviews. There were four tapings that were edited into the special: two sit-down sessions and two stand-up sessions. The sit-down shows feature Elvis, Scotty Moore, DJ Fontana, Charlie Hodge, and Alan Fortas. HBO would later air the first of the two sessions, Elvis: One Night with You, in 1985. The DVD is out of print so check your local library.
Springsteen on the special: “He was in search of a way to live where he could live with himself. The ’68 special, for me, is him finding that place. When people discuss Elvis or their disappointment in the arc of his career, they say ‘He didn’t go where his destiny was leading him enough.’ That night, he went where his destiny was leading him and he met it.”
For a film that Netflix is marketing as being about the 1968 Comeback Special, Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley spends way too much time discussing Elvis’s earlier life and career.
DIRECTOR: Jason Hehir
FEATURING: Jerry Schilling, Robbie Robertson, Baz Luhrmann, Priscilla Presley, Wright Th0mpson, Darlene Love, John Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Conan O’Brien, Ernst Jørgensen, Billy Corgan, Sandi Tompkins
Netflix released Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley on November 13, 2024. Grade: 2.5/5
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