January 8, 2025
Merry Elvismas! Today marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of Elvis Presley. If you're looking for a Springsteen-connected way to commemorate and celebrate the lasting impact of "The King," perhaps you're considering the latest Presley documentary in which Bruce Springsteen appears: Netflix's Return of The King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley, which has been streaming on Netflix since last November.
Ostensibly, the documentary's subject is Presley's famous 1968 "comeback" television special, but it explores the significance of the special in the context of Presley's entire career preceding it, and even - to a certain extent - following it. Unfortunately, undertaking such an exploration - all while trying to combine it with at least a decent amount of footage from the television special itself - is an impossibly tall order for a documentary that is only ninety minutes long.
Not surprisingly, among the best parts of Jason Hehir's film are Springsteen's interview segments, recalling what the 1968 special meant to him as a first-generation, die-hard Presley fan. Of course Bruce has talked about this subject (and many more Elvis-related things) many times before, but here he offers some interesting new wrinkles, especially about Elvis rediscovering his authentic self. One of Bruce's best lines in the film, which also appears in the trailer embedded above, is "I felt like my team came back, and they're winning again!" Also featured is interview footage featuring insights from the great Darlene Love, who was one of Presley's backing singers on the 1968 special. (The film's credits thank Stevie Van Zandt, Marc Ribler, and Rich Russo, presumably for helping to arrange the Darlene Love interview.)
The main problem with this film, however, is that it stands in the very tall shadow of Thom Zimny's definitive two-part documentary Elvis Presley: The Searcher. Return of the King even uses the same 1956 Presley B-side for its opening credits that Zimny's 2018 film used in its opening credits: "My Baby Left Me." The uniquely presented heard-but-never-seen-onscreen insights of Bruce Springsteen that were offered in Elvis Presley: The Searcher were accompanied by similarly perceptive and presented insights from a slew of famous and not-so-famous folks who were close to Presley and/or deeply affected by his music. What Return of the King has to offer in its interview segments - with Love's and Springsteen's newly filmed interviews joined by new/original footage of Billy Corgan, Ernst Jørgensen, Baz Luhrmann, Conan O'Brien, Priscilla Presley, Robbie Robertson, Jerry Schilling, and Wright Thompson, some of whom also contributed interviews/insights to Zimny's film - simply cannot compare or compete with the appropriately epic scope and amount of the interviews in Elvis Presley: The Searcher. (By the way, you can click here and here to read my archived Backstreets coverage on the making of Elvis Presley: The Searcher, featuring exclusive conversations with Thom Zimny, Priscilla Presley, and Jerry Schilling.)
Of course, both films also feature archival commentary from Elvis Presley himself, but Elvis Presley: The Searcher relies strictly on actual recordings of things that Presley actually said in his lifetime, in order to convey his own voice and perspective. Return of the King, on the other hand, greatly utilizes newly recorded and mixed-in voiceovers from an Elvis impersonator reading scripted lines based on speculations of what Presley might have thought or said in private. It's a controversial approach in documentary filmmaking, to say the least, though it's also one that was utilized in This Is Elvis, Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt's 1981 documentary that at one time was the greatest Presley documentary in existence... until the arrival of Elvis Presley: The Searcher, that is.
But inarguably the worst part of Return of the King is its propagation of the argument that the '68 Comeback Special represents the single greatest peak - and the final one - of Elvis' achievements as an artist. As great as the television special was, however, it was followed by his triumphant 1969 return to live performance in his Las Vegas residencies, the string of late-1960s/early-1970s hits that began with "In The Ghetto" and "Suspicious Minds," and his still-highly-underrated 1970s recordings and concerts. As Dave Marsh wrote in his liner notes for the still-essential 1995 five-CD boxed-set Walk A Mile In My Shoes: The Essential 70's Masters, "Elvis' Seventies music has been picked at and picked over, issued and reissued, discussed, dissected, distorted, displayed and dismissed. But it's only now, gathered into one place, that it kind of makes you gulp a bit to realize how productive he was in the last six years of his life. Especially given that health problems dogged him through much of this time, Elvis created a really remarkable batch of recordings...Elvis continued to be a great popular singer, able to tackle all manner of songs and, in fact, left behind a legacy that few, if any other, artists of his era could hope to match...[A]s he matured. Elvis' music became more and more personal and revealing, so that even while he seemed utterly immune to any influence from the personalized and confessional approach of rock singers like John Lennon and Bob Dylan, he managed in his own fashion to use the additional artistic space their work opened to expose deeper and more intimate parts of himself." (Incidentally, if you're seeking a literary way to celebrate Elvis@90, you simply can't do any better than Dave Marsh's 1982 book Elvis. Highly recommended reading for all Presleymaniacs.)
So while it may be somewhat disappointing to learn that the latest Presley documentary involving Bruce Springsteen isn't anywhere near as good as that 2018 doc was, at least you also know that the 2018 documentary remains readily available to watch. Oh, and how appropriate that right in time for this year's Elvismas celebration, it's just been announced that Bruce Springsteen will make his first official appearance on Elvis Presley's original record label, Sun Records, come April. Stay tuned for more from us on that later...
Merry Elvismas to all, and to all a good night!