If you are a fan of The Beatles, all you need is love and a Disney+ subscription to get back to where you once belonged. Every couple of months seems to bring another documentary.
The next one, Beatles ’64, begins streaming on November 29. It is produced by Martin Scorsese (too busy, it seems, to work on that SCTV documentary) and directed by David Tedeschi (who edited Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living in the Material World).
While I can’t imagine what is left for Paul McCartney and Ringo Star that they haven’t already said about their big, breakthrough year in America, I am excited to see restored in 4K footage from Albert and David Maysles’ The Beatles: The First US Visit. Shot in ’64, the Maysles brothers caught the Fab Four in the eye of the Beatlemania huricane, producing a fascinating blueprint for their first feature-length scripted movie shot weeks later, A Hard Day’s Night.
What about, however, the guy who inspired The Beatles to become a skiffle band back in ’57? Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley, which premiered earlier this week on Netflix, is the story of, in commentator Conan O’Brien’s words, Presley’s incredible “Third Act.” Seemingly washed up after a string of mediocre-at-best Hollywood rom-coms forced on him by a dead end deal struck by his manager, Col. Tom Parker, Presley in ’68 went back to the medium that launched his career in the mid-’50s — television. He re-emerged as the coolest dude on the planet.
Don’t take my word for it. Besides O’Brien, the doc features first-hand commentary from Bruce Springsteen, Darleen Love, Billy Corgan, Robbie Robertson (who died in August of 2023 at 80), director Baz Luhrmann, Elvis’s wife Pricilla Presley (also listed as a producer), friend and movie stand-in Jerry Schilling, and, in archived footage, Bob Dylan and former bandmates D.J. Fontana and Scotty Moore. Springsteen is a surprisingly effective voice, evoking the thrill of seeing Presley spring back to life in the landmark special. Says The Boss, “I felt like, ‘My team came back and they’re winning again!'”
Director Jason Hehir has produced and directed several 30 for 30 and other sports documentaries, including a great one on wrestler Andre The Giant. This music doc starts slow with an Elvis 101 backstory for Gen viewers X, Y and Z.
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Things pick up when we get to the special itself. The fascinating part for me was the outtakes showing how, once again, Parker was trying to sabotage Presley’s career with soul-killing sketches and other corny crap. We see a nervous Presley muffing his lines, his heart not in it.
Fortunately, the producers, including Steve Binder (later, believe-it-or-not, among those responsible for Pee-wee’s Playhouse), happened to notice that the Presley who sat around between takes with his Memphis pals jamming and riffing was the electric hero who first blazed a trail in the ’50s. Pushing past Parker’s “over my dead body” objections, the opening jam session became the most sensational part of the music special.
It helped, as O’Brien points out, that the then 33-year-old superstar “comes out, and he’s the best-looking guy on the planet.”
Back in the ’90s, I used to travel to New York and attend Rockefeller Plaza tapings of O’Brien’s original NBC late night show. The red-haired host used to warm up the studio audience himself by stepping into the bleachers, guitar in hand, and full-throated rip through Presley songs. Only after working himself into a frenzy would he start the show.
The Fall and Rise documentary ends there, with “we all know how this turns out” from a few of the commentators. The point of this Netflix film is that Presley’s sad end no longer matters. For one spectacular moment, he was unshackled and fully himself again, performing in front of fans for the first time in seven years. He went on to do what he loved best, close to 400 live shows, most of them in Las Vegas. The Fall and Rise allows us once again to celebrate Presley at his peak.
