He didn’t even want to sing in them, but producers had different ideas. On his first movies, Presley was so serious about acting he learned not just his lines, but everyone else’s. As Part One moves toward a close, we see the Colonel giving his client everything he wants. Zimny and company explain the appeal of Elvis’ manager-to-be Colonel Tom Parker: The singer had sincere ambitions to act in movies, he wanted to sell records nationally and Phillips ran a one-man, regional operation that could not give him those things. Zimny and his interviewees offer plenty of colorful stories from this period, charting a commercial success that happened quickly but only, as Presley archivist Ernst Jorgensen points out, thanks to an enormous amount of work on the touring circuit.Īnd then came the Colonel. He got more than he could have hoped for in Presley’s sound, which, far from just aping Big Joe Turner et al, mixed strains of music few could have imagined would make sense together. Petty tells us that, “for a lot of noble reasons,” Phillips had been looking for a white ambassador who could carry the exciting sounds of new black music beyond the “race records” commercial ghetto created by the big record companies. It’s a thrill to join the musician in these years, even if only through the accounts of others, and Zimny follows as the young singer has his fateful encounters with Sun Studio’s Sam Phillips. The town was not integrated, but it was diverse, and the Elvis we meet was busy slipping into black nightclubs and houses of worship, picking his influences, magpie-like, as he assembled “his version of himself.” So now, when we’re hearing from Elvis’ childhood friend Red West or historian Bill Ferris, we’re seeing the world this “most eclectic” music-lover was eagerly consuming: clips of everyone from Howlin‘ Wolf to sanctified preachers to bluegrass pickers street scenes from Tupelo, Mississippi, and then Memphis, where the family moved, a place whose vibrant city life made it as exciting as Paris to small-town newcomers.
Sure to fare well when it bows April 14 on HBO, it made for a spellbinding big-screen experience at the music-rooted SXSW Film Festival.
Chipping away calcified layers of myth and caricature to address the psychology behind Presley’s career, its seriousness and sensitivity is no surprise to those who’ve followed the series of documentaries Zimny has been making about Bruce Springsteen. Can it really be true that an Elvis Presley documentary as probing and thoughtful as Thom Zimny’s Elvis Presley: The Searcher does not already exist? After decades of home video performance-film releases and docs of varying quality, this two-part, three and a half-hour film feels like a landmark, something that should be welcomed as warmly as the two Elvis books published in the 1990s by Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love.
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