ELVIS ON TOUR
Directed by PIERRE ADIDGE and ROBERT ABEL
This is a movie of missed opportunities; something very shrewd, pointed and telling could have been made about the man who began as a hard-driving rock star and became a sort of spangled mascot of Middle America. There is plentiful material here for social satire, the sort of thing the National Film Board of Canada did so nicely in their lacerating documentary on Paul Anka, Lonely Boy. Elvis might also have made a subject for a diverting visual essay on the sociology of pop. The filmmakers, who are responsible for the easygoing Joe Cocker documentary Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1971), attempt none of this. Instead they settle for compiling an obsequious family album.
The credits bill Colonel Tom Parker as technical adviser, a title that does not do him justice. The colonel has been by Presley’s side since the beginning, a combination Machiavelli and mother hen without whose approval nothing goes out under the Presley imprimatur. While the colonel does not actually appear in Elvis on Tour, his influence is strongly felt. Thus, although it is supposed to be a documentary, most of the movie’s scenes seem as spontaneous as the Sadlers Wells Ballet. The concert footage is sweaty and lifeless, the music a combination of housebroken rock and soul-less gospel.
A couple of minor and diverting curiosities are included: the presence- fleeting, alas-of an agonizingly unfunny comedian named Jackie Kahane; a fast, amusing montage of clinches from old Elvis pictures, featuring the star leering and nuzzling a variety of pneumatic starlets; and a close look, offstage and on, at the Presley wardrobe, which for sheer flamboyance probably has not been matched since the days of Marie Antoinette. “J.C.
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