This Was Elvis

On the 30th anniversary I watched the first DVD release of This Is Elvis, a 1981 biopic/docudrama that is still the best overview of Presley's life. I first saw this in the theatre's and coming just 4 years after his death was struck by the amount of material that I'd never seen before. I think most people felt the same. Since 1981 a ton of documentaries and movies have been made, but not in the same film. Ral Donner's from the voice narration as Elvis is so good that it's better than any of his own records, and the staged sequences are only used to supply footage of events that no camera caught (Elvis visiting his mother in the hospital, Elvis as teenager). What makes this an essential buy is the inclusion of the 1983 video rerelease that had 40 minutes of extra stuff, including one that skipped by me over the years: Elvis in 1960 on the Sinatra Special giving a raw early '56 type performance of "Stuck On You". This is the way it is for us die-hard's. Still mining for nuggets.