AllMovie

Using Alfred Wertheimer's magnificent collection of photos of Elvis Presley as a jumping-off point, filmmakers Susan and Alan Raymond fashioned the most coherent and touching documentary about the King of Rock 'n' Roll. Wertheimer trailed Elvis through his annus mirabilis, just after he had signed his contract with RCA and began to take the national stage. The film adeptly mixes the familiar clips of Elvis on various TV shows (it can be argued that he was the first pop music star created, in part, by TV) with the Wertheimer pictures of an unguarded 21-year-old former truck driver who is by turns exhilarated, exhausted, bewitched, and bewildered by everything that's happening to him. If this is not quite "Elvis raw," it is "Elvis unprocessed." As Wertheimer notes in the introduction to his book, in the fall of 1956 RCA's publicity files on Elvis were given to his manager Colonel Tom Parker, and thereafter, Parker "controlled all media access to the private Elvis." The Raymonds' film is therefore extremely valuable for giving us glimpses of one of the world's most famous people before a curtain descended on him and his image began to be burnished by one of popular entertainment's great Svengalis. Elvis '56 is not just a portrait of an artist as a young man, it's a series of snapshots of a king before he ascended his throne and forever left behind any semblance of a normal life.