Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert. A marketing award to whichever genius came up with that title for this epic rebrand of old product done with such polish and dash that it casts Elvis Presley anew – all over again.
Baz Luhrmann is credited as the director but here he’s more an editor. Having come across tons of never-seen material in the vaults while researching his Elvis biopic a few years back, he decided to take a closer look at what he’d found, the raw footage to the Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and the Elvis on Tour movies. Undoubtedly this was prompted by the realisation that the celluloid itself was in astonishingly good condition – that’s what decades spent in a salt mine can do for your looks. With a bit of jiggery pokery to audio sync some footage that didn’t have any original sound – authenticity concerns to Mr Luhrmann, please – here is the equivalent done for the King that Peter Jackson did for the Beatles.
We’re-not-worthy hagiography, to an extent, though it’s easy to buy into the proposition with both films that these guys were worthy of the adulation.
New readers can start here. Luhrmann gives us a lightning crash through Elvis’s early years – the swivel of mid-1950s Elvis the Pelvis and the puritanical backlash to the Army years and on to the movies and their diminishing returns (artistically and financially) through the 1960s – before Elvis’s decision to return to live music, followed by 1,100 performances between 1969 and 1977.
The movie proper starts here and is traditional backstage rehearsal mixed with performance footage plus scene-setting archive. We see Elvis running through songs old (Del Shannon’s Runaway) and new (George Harrison’s Something), a man who is happy, handsome, funny and in charge, self-deprecating, hammy at times – “They bring it out of me, the ham,” he chuckles, referring to his band. That’s the thing about Elvis, like James Bond no matter what the criticism, or charge of self-parody, he was already aware of it – the karate, the cape, the rhinestones, it’s all showbiz.
So, fat Elvis, Elvis drugged-up, sweating, forgetting his lines and dying on the toilet? That was all in the future, though Luhrmann makes oblique references to all the various dark sides for anyone with an Elvis antenna. When Luhrmann goes into a little section on Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s demonised manager, he puts his little montage together over a bed of Devil in Disguise – wink wink. For the most part, though, this is Elvis as you’d want yourself to be remembered – shiny hair, hydrated skin, rocking a psychedelic shirt, cool and entirely on top of things. When he’s bowled a tricky question by a journalist he knows how to counter it. One early snide interviewer asks him if what he does is singing. I don’t know, sir, Elvis replies, but there are five million record buyers who think it is.
The band is big but they are as tight as a drum, the backing singers the best, and everyone is able to switch from intimate gospel to those big numbers like An American Trilogy which only Elvis can really pull off. There is the odd blur-on by a famous face. Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jr are seen backstage after the show, but it’s the reactions of the fans that makes it. They simply cannot believe they are there – eyes dilated, mouths open. It cannot be overstated enough what a brilliant job Lurhmann and his team of editors, digital-enhancement artists, data wranglers and audio wizards have done.
Elvis never left the USA, except “in the service” as he puts it. So the world never got to see him at full spate, as he is here. We owe Mr Luhrmann for this reminder how good Elvis Presley was when he was on his game. Thanks to him the King’s truth goes marching on.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
