Ohh, ohhh, ohhh, I wanna see it! Campy throwback or not, still sounds like a good movie to laugh at and/or with. Or it could be spectacular.
“Performance (1970 Film)” (Jack Nitzsche, Ry Cooder)
Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance : When it was released in America in 1970, Performance was generally trashed in the press. John Simon called it “indescribably sleazy,” and for Richard Schickel it was “the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing.” Warner Brothers, who produced the picture, were unable to decipher its story, unresponsive toward its metaphysical airs, and horrified by the homoerotic violence and nudity that earned it an ‘X’ rating. They distributed it two years after it was completed — but not without extensive cuts....
It bombed in first run, but two or three years later Performance found a niche for itself as a ‘rock movie’ on the midnight show circuit. Young, stoned audiences responded to the strange tale of a violent gangster, Chas (James Fox), on the run from his own people, taking refuge in the house of a retired rock star, Turner (Jagger). The other occupants, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton), contribute in a spontaneous experiment, prodding Chas to comprehend his intellectual and sexual deficiencies while simultaneously ridding Turner of his suffocating inertia and regain his ‘demon.’ (“Don’t you get it?” screams Pherber. “He’s stuck! Stuck!”)
apparently finally going to be released on DVD, in February. IMDb here, which includes some fun facts:
At a test screening in Santa Monica in March 1970, one Warner executive's wife vomited with shock in response to the film and paying customers had to be offered their money back.Some of the 16mm footage of sex scenes were so explict that the film processing lab refused to develop it, referring to obscenity laws, and instead went on destroying it with hammer and chisel.
The sex scenes between Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg upset Jagger's fellow The Rolling Stones member Keith Richards. Richards, who was Pallenberg's lover at the time, was reported to have lurked outside the set in a foul mood. Pallenberg had previously been the partner of another Stones member, Brian Jones, who, according to Alex Cox (presenter of BBC2's Moviedrome), partly inspired the character of Turner.
I've also read of rumors of Crowley-worship, Satanic ritualism, and so forth taking place on the set (Cammell was into it), but that could just be hype.
There are enough romantic flourishes in Cammell’s life to warrant a full-scale biography. Born in 1934 under the prophetic eye of the Camera Obscura of Edinburgh, Donald was of the Cammells of Cammell Laird, a major shipbuilding concern. His father, Charles Richard Cammell, was an aesthete who contributed articles to miscellaneous periodicals — Scotsman, Connoisseur, and the Atlantis Quarterly: A Journal Devoted to Atlantean and Occult Studies — and wrote biographies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Aleister Crowley, the latter a friend of the family.
When in his twenties, Donald had aspirations of becoming a painter, but after observing the nouvelle vague in all its glory, came to believe that the future of art was in cinema. (He had a walk-on as a tourist asking for directions in Eric Rohmer’s 1967 film, La Collectionneuse.) Later embracing Britain’s cultural revolution — ‘Swinging London’ — Cammell moved among the mods and rockers and had a distant acquaintance with underworld figures, all of whom figure prominently in Performance.
The story of gangsters and rock stars appealed to Warners (an early casting suggestion had Jagger with Marlon Brando and Tuesday Weld), but London itself was an additional selling point. “They wanted to make a film which would capture the new youth culture and its capital,” writes MacCabe. “The American studios had proved spectacularly bad at this exercise…But there had been a series of films which had got closer: Dick Lester’s film with the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and, above all, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. All had shown a foreigner’s view of the capital. Now…a Hollywood studio was on the real inside track. A film about swinging London by a swinging Londoner.”
Cammell utilized these ingredients to enhance the screenplay’s metaphoric study of self deception, the ‘performance’ or veneer one cultivates and sustains in order to dodge honesty and self awareness. Most of it derived from literary influences — Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, and especially Jorge Luis Borges, whose face shatters on the screen near the end of the picture. In one scene, Jagger, playacting a 50’s greaser in black leather and pompadour (mocking Chas’s amplified masculinity), delivers the film’s maxim: “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness” — when performance consumes performer....
‘Merger’ is heard repeatedly in the dialogue, and Mick Brown points to Borges’s theory that “every man is two men,” realized at the end upon the fusion of Chas (the personification of violence) and Turner (pacifism). In the first half of the picture, gangsters (seen reading Borges on their coffee break!), businessmen and lawyers are so utterly lost in their oppressive performance that single-mindedness has left them homosexual. In the second half, Cammell examines what he called “the interchangeability of gender,” via Chas’s overbearing manliness, Pherber’s domineering femininity, and Turner and Lucy’s androgyny, narcissistic characters approaching the liberation of the female-man and the male-woman, a ‘complete’ individual.
(Bridging the two halves, a scene transpires between a black man — the musician Noel — and his mother, who is white. As the soundtrack includes the songs “Wake Up Niggers,” by the Last Poets, and “Poor White Hound Dog,” by Jack Nitzche, Cammell may have intended race to be as dominant an issue as sex. A major influence on Borges was H.G. Wells, whose novel, The Time Machine, predicts an interracial society.)
Why this strange experiment? Why the merger of sex and race and personality? Cammell’s formative years were lived with a father sensitive to the principles of Dante Rossetti and the pre-Raphaelites. A movement against stale, formula-driven art, they mourned the death of one culture’s passion and trumpeted the glory of another’s birth. In this respect, Performance transcends every other youth and/or counterculture film of its period. Rapid fashion trends stunted “the Sixties,” when automatic nostalgia dated movies within weeks of their release. They were products manufactured by calculating producers quick to capitalize on flighty, superficial tastes — indeed, Warners’ own impetus for backing Performance. Cammell and Roeg’s film may appear outwardly passé in its psychedelic drug use, music, hair and clothing styles, and Christopher Gibbs’s Moroccan set design, but in truth its ‘hippiedom’ spans centuries, beyond the pre-Raphaelites, back to al-Hassan ibn-al-Sabbah and his declaration of moral freedom, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
I'm sold.
Ooh, the movie actually is available for pre-order at Amazon, just hidden.
Performance (1970) Starring: James Fox, Mick Jagger Director: Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg Rating X
