ELVIS ON TOUR Abel & Adidge . (MGiyi) *

You should make up your mind either about being an electrician or playing a guitar. I never saw a guitar player that was worth a damn.

Vernon Presley

This time Elvis plays himself. His father’s immortal quote opens Elvis’ 33rd movie, which spotlights the living legend not only as a guitar player and singer but in his latest role as “the leader of a big ole band.”

To date, the picture is only a moderate success - surprising, in view of the sell-out concert tour the movie revolves around. With such an obsessed acrossthe-board audience, $2.00 doesn’t seem extravagant to see The King in multiscreen color.

He’s not playing a high school romance, playboy soldier or Indian cowboy this time — rather than selling the movie by using Elvis, he uses the movie to sell himself. Elvis On Tour is a tour ^ of Elvis. The highlights of his life are the movie’s highlights, from Ed Sullivan Show excerpts to sepia snapshots. But the best, most hilarious and true-toform scene comes during “Love Me Tender.” As Elvis bows down to kiss one of his horny, hysterical fans at the foot of the stage, shots from the MGM archives file past as he embraces Shelley Fabares, Ann-Margaret and a dozen other leading ladies. It’s one of the few self-conscious moments in any Elvis flick, and it hits like a hammer. Like Jerry Lewis or John Wayne movies, Elvis movies are a genre unique unto themselves — as unique as Presley himself, maybe. He’s the auteur’s auteur.

Elvis On Tour proves what we’ve long suspected: the greatest Elvis movie is the one where he is on screen most, doing least. Action is an affront to the man; he is so graceful that he can exist without moving a finger, gliding through on muscle. Elvis doesn’t have to think about doing things, he just lets them happen. If that makes him a shitty — or a great — actor, it doesn’t matter anymore than the question of whether or not he has ever done anything with his musical talent. He epitomizes effortlessness.

And in the ultimate contradiction, champions it. One begins to think, as he sings a song about his divorce, that finally we might have a human King. But no, Elvis is smarter than that: he forces the issue to become a pop concern, which automatically trivializes it and warns us away from taking it too seriously.

Abel and Adidge, the Mad Dogs and Englishmen duo, filmed this musical documentary (of sorts). They did attempt to capture about as personal a glimpse as could be expected. After Elvis finally consented to their request for backstage privileges, so his candid reactions could be caught on film, the movie-makers also got him to talk about himself. There’s always the question of whether or not a person with mystique is anything more than meets the eye. That’s why Movie Screen and Photoplay exist. One crucial aspect of Elvis’ roots is revealed here in a recording studio scene where he joins his backup singers, the Jordanaires, in a gospel song, and later, during a performance, when he spotlights them. The expression on Elvis’ face through “The Lord Is My Inspiration” or something like that, changes from a sincere, almost pious look to one of childlike admiration and then he shakes his head self-consciously, and playing “The Pelvis” again, propels into “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.”

After all, unless his private concerns are on the level of “In the Ghetto,” or “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” Elvis never talks about what’s really bugging him. It’s a principle, one he never violates, and so the songs that might have humanized him become a fortress designed to keep that humanization from ever occuring. In the end, he might have had to go to the Colonel in order to receive a dispensation for his divorce, the way that he might have had a discussion, probably a brief one, with Parker about whether or not he should go into the Army.

If he hadn’t gone into the Army, if he had become a futuristic Muhammad Ali, the stakes would have been raised to the point where Elvis would have had to own up to his own power. But that’s the one thing Elvis can never do: cop to his own genius. The fact of the matter is that Elvis is forbidden from ever realizing his own genius, lest it become a mere neurotic sympton, like Dylan’s or Lennon’s.

genius It’s better was what that brought way. The the denial live of Elvis his back to us — even in a different form, and one his original audience, and what grew out of that audience, ■ couldn’t accept — after years of nothing but movies, and what will enable him to continue touring and recording years after the fantasy of the “whole rhythm section was the Purple Gang” has withered into something minor. Maybe his genius is just that, the genius of making the boring engrossing. Who knows? You can’t get past the idea of seeing that, even when he is off stage, he still LOOKS like Elvis Presley. What a burden!

Robbie Cruger

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Dave Marsh

AMERICAN GRAFFITI George Lucas (Universal)

With all the nostalgic ring of a freshly popped hubcap, some folks remember the 50’s best as a time for cruising. Folks from distant western points of the compass like San Rafael, San Leandro and Modesto, California who whiled away their adolescence in automobiles dragging the main street of town, checking it all out.

“Modesto in its heyday would be packed,” says one who knows, director George Lucas. “It was a constant battle with the police. There would literally be five or six hundred people cruising. We had two streets, 10th and 11th, each one way in an opposite direction, 15 or 16 blocks long. You have to have at least two lanes so you can pull up next to girls and talk to them. We had three lanes.”

By any standards, 27-year-old Lucas, one of San Francisco Bay Area’s upcoming film talents, has enjoyed an enviable run of luck in his life. He has a knack for meeting good people.

Some years ago while indulging a penchant for auto racing at the track, he chanced to meet Haskell Wexler, director of Medium Cool. (“We talked about racing manifolds, Chandler Grove carburetors and Columbia rearends,” Wexler recalls.) Upon hearing of the lad’s interest in movie making, Wexler suggested attending the film school at the University of Southern California.

At the tail end of studies there, Lucas received an observer-trainee scholarship to watch a real live director at the Warner Bros, studios who turned out to be none other than the man who would one day make The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola.

“There was this skinny bearded guy watching us all the time,” says Coppola. “I was very insecure and after a while I went up to him and asked, ‘What are you looking at?’ He said, ‘Not much.’ That was George Lucas.”

Two years ago, working out of Coppola’s America Zoetrope studio, Lucas completed his first feature film, “THX-1138,” a science fiction adventure which received favorable reviews but suffered considerably from Warner Bros, lack of cooperation with distribution.

Presently, the thin, energetic director, still looking much the teen punk, is busy editing his second feature, shot, with Wexler as Director of Photography and Coppola as Executive Producer. Titled “American Graffiti,” a name which may be canned by the funding studio, Universal, the film features Wolfman Jack playing himself and Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids masquerading as Herbie and the Heartbeats at a high school hop. Scheduled for release in early 1973, it’s about being a teenager there and then.

Wolfman Jack, in the Bay Area for an evening’s location shooting, shares Lucas’ affection for the period. “It was one of the happiest times of my life,” he growls. “The music reflected a very happy time. Make love and get laid was the theme of the music. It was one of the fun times in America.”

From that fun time, Lucas has worked the pick hits of the era into his script: car hops, “Rock Around The Clock,” teen love, drag racing, finding bums to buy your booze, et al. Backed with a sound track of period rock that will cut Easy Rider, the storyline follows the last evening of high school pals about to be broken up as some of them go to college through a night of drunkenness, making out, fights, car rolling, and, of course, crpising.

“The lure of cruising is to meet girls,” says Lucas. “Sex is the lure. And it’s like gambling, you never know who you’ll end up with. Eventually you meet the girl of your dreams — that’s the myth you believe because somebody else said they did.”

Hal Aigner