“When it Has Elvis Presley In It”: Toward a Taxonomy of Rock and Roll Films

Abstract

This paper offers a consideration of the various ways that critics, scholars, and audiences have classified films as “rock and roll movies.” Drawing from Rick Altman’s writings on film genres, where he famously pointed out that certain audiences answered the question, “when is a musical not a musical” with “when it has Elvis Presley in it,” and referring to recent writings on the relationship between rock and film by David E James and K.J. Donnelly, I seek to establish a multi-pronged taxonomy of the rock and roll film as its own genre, one that incorporates numerous generic traditions, including the musical, the biopic, and the documentary. Just as Hollywood studios did not deliberately set out to make films noir in the 1940’s, those studios and newly emerging independent producers did not necessarily set out to make “rock and roll” movies, though they exploited the “craze” for their own economic ends. Critic Howard Hampton argues that rock cinema exists only with examples of possibilities unrealized; I argue that the category “rock and roll film” can be conceived in broader terms that must take into account the specific historical and economic contexts that have led to the emergence and transformation of the genre.