Hips, Hysteria and the King

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is directed by Baz Luhrmann, so it was never likely to feel like a quiet trawl through archival material. Instead, it plays out as a full-scale sensory experience - immersive, kinetic, and unapologetically heightened.

There was this one sequence in particular which draws on never-before-seen footage from Elvis’s first Las Vegas shows and in rehearsals. In Baz’s hands, it isn’t simply presented; it’s orchestrated. Flash and frenzy give way to tight close-ups, glistening sweat, screaming girls, split-second edits. The camera doesn’t observe so much as swoon.

And at the centre of it all is Elvis Presley himself - all charisma, danger, and that famously “improper” lunge. It’s the kind of on-screen presence that still has the power to make you sit a little straighter and question your moral footing.

At the absolute height of it - hips fully deployed, audience in rapture, editing turned up to eleven - my mum (who was a teenage girl when Elvis first emerged in the 1950s) leaned over and, in the most gently scandalised English tone imaginable, whispered:

“I don’t feel I should be watching this.”

Seventy-odd years later and she’s still half-expecting someone to confiscate her 45s.

Somewhere between the bright lights of Vegas and the comfort of our local cinema, Elvis remains not entirely proper.

Baz Luhrmann hasn’t simply polished the past; he’s rekindled its spark of mischief. The King, it seems, has lost none of his talent for unsettling the well-behaved.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ1jr7WzNHg