“I am a bit old-fashioned,” says Chas (James Fox). He’s a vicious enforcer for a London gangster who, after killing a man, pretends to be a juggler named Johnny Dean and inveigles his way into the huge bohemian Notting Hill mansion of Turner (Mick Jagger), a retired rock star. Chas describes the milieu to a friend over the phone: “What a freak show. On the left, you know. I tell you it’s terrible. It’s a right piss-hole. Long hair, beatniks, druggers, free love, foreigners, you name it.” Sounds ideal, and the man on the other end starts smiling.
That meet-cute between Chas and Turner is the high concept of Performance, made in 1968 by writer-director Donald Cammell and co-director/photographer Nicolas Roeg. It got put on the shelf by Warner Brothers executives, who were mystified unto hatred by it before they finally released and mismanaged it in 1970. They did, however, give it a good tagline: “This film is about vice. And versa.” Now Performance is on Criterion in a new UHD/Blu-ray combo, and it looks and sounds as bewitching and baffling as ever.
Performance plays like a double feature. The first 40 or 45 minutes are as vicious and violent a gangster movie as anyone had seen. It paved the bloody asphalt for brutal British crime dramas that followed from filmmakers such as Mike Hodges, John Mackenzie, Stephen Frears, and Peter Medak. The violence was one of the elements that horrified Warner Brothers. It’s not that anything is brutally graphic, although yeah, kind of. Rather, James Fox’s Chas’ casual delight in his job makes the viewer queasy. “I get a load of kicks out of it,” he says as though admitting he likes a pint of beer now and then. “Putting a little stick about, putting the frighteners on flash little twerps.” Or as he also puts it, “I like a bit of a cavort.”
On this point alone, Performance foreshadows two British releases of 1971. The most famous is Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, famous for its anti-hero’s devotion to “ultra-violence” for the sake of it. The more obscure title is Michael Tuchner’s Villain, in which Richard Burton plays a vicious homosexual gangster partly modeled on Ronnie Kray, who was gay and very much a public figure.
With a wink and nod, Performance lets us know that Chas’ boss, the avuncular if sinister Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon in a terrific comic performance), has a casually acknowledged liking for muscular lads, and we can’t help wondering about the rest of his retinue. All the gangster dialogue has a comic, parodic edge, a little camp, and a little satirical of capitalism and class aspirations.
In an early scene, one of them sounds like any conservative hand-wringer about the shocking decline of standards and what effect it will have on kids to have “claret all over the screen”. That references fake blood in violent movies, and Performance will toss about great swaths of red paint and a whole faceful of red hair dye.
James Fox’s Chas assures us he’s “normal” as he spirals down the rabbit hole of Turner’s menage, but it’s a while before Performance gets there. The opening credits get us used to the flashy editing style that jumps between various things. The first shot is of a supersonic jet in the sky, perhaps from news footage. The second shot is from a camera on the jet, looking back at the contrail.
Then we’re hovering in the sky above a flashy Rolls Royce (I think) speeding along a pretty country road, and we’ll keep returning to that drive between teasing fragmentary images of Chas and some bit of crumpet thrashing in bed. Money, sex, speed, modern transport, hardware, the men driving, the movies: it’s the world in 1968.
Then we’re treated to Chas doing his job in breathlessly edited scenes of destruction and intimidation, until we get to an almost orgiastic, extended scene of destroying an expensive car with acid or something corrosive, while the tied-up chauffeur is shaved bald as a message for “your owner”. The owner is a stiff, posh lawyer (Allan Cuthbertson) who makes a speech about how gangsters taking control of small businesses for “protection” belong to a modern racket also called “the merger”, which sounds like “murder” while commenting on perfectly legal aspects of monopoly capitalism.
Chas finally meets Turner, played by Mick Jagger as a variant of himself with perhaps a dash of his ex-Rolling Stone Brian Jones. Turner lives in a menage with two women, although one of them confusingly resembles a man and is described more than once as skinny like a boy. She’s Lucy (Michele Breton), a French girl with visa problems whose bushy hair resembles Turner’s, and the resemblance is exploited in a surreal edit that can make viewers question if they saw what they saw. Was it Lucy in bed beside James Fox/Chas and planting a kiss on him, or wasn’t it Mick Jagger/Turner?
The other woman is the strangely named Pherber, played by model Anita Pallenberg, who was also Brian Jones’ girlfriend at the time, just to confuse us. In a parallel to the opening sex scene, she joins Turner and Lucy in an introductory three-way decorously under blankets. As she initially looks at the other two sleeping figures through her 8mm camera, Lucy and Turner look like male twins.
Is this a play on the Kray Brothers? A real pair of male twins will shortly have a brief cameo. As you’ll gather, Performance thrives on disorientations, and surely that’s one of the things that makes this time-capsule 1968 movie also a timeless puzzle resonating down the decades.
We mustn’t forget the moment when Pherber lifts her willowy gown to expose her shapely behind to the camera as she sticks a needle in it. Turner says, “You do too much of that shit,” and she replies, “Too much vitamin B-12 doesn’t hurt anybody.” This is among several moments where the script of Performance is taking shots at behind-the-camera realities.
Another is when Chas tells Turner, “You’re a comical little geezer. You’ll look funny when you’re 50.” That foreshadows Mick Jagger’s later statement that he’d rather be dead than still singing “Satisfaction” at 45. Ah, well. Another household member of unknown provenance is little Lorraine (Laraine Wickens), a kind of Greek chorus – wise beyond her years who dons a fake mustache and calls Mick Jagger’s Turner “Old Rubber Lips”.
The second half of Performance, then, is Chas in Wonderland, as he not only masquerades and juggles his identity but finds himself challenged by the menage, especially when they drug him out of his mind. Turner abruptly shows up as a mockery of Chas, a leather-jacketed punk in sideburns who declares, “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Right? Right? You with me?” Chas may be confused, but he knows that much from his own tendency to get carried away, which is what’s landed him here. “I’m with you,” he says.
Speaking of performances, the dichotomy between character and actor officially dissolves when Mick Jagger’s Turner sings a Robert Johnson song. Did we mention this soundtrack is rad? Jack Nitzsche wrote new music, as arranged by Randy Newman, and Merry Clayton‘s vocals are essential. Before Chas meets Turner, he enters the star’s domain and hears the provocative and prescient “Wake Up, Nigger” by the Last Poets. Buffy Sainte-Marie sings “Dyed, Dead, Red”.
In what many may consider the film’s surreal highlight, we’re treated to a full-blown music-video style performance of Mick Jagger’s original “Memo from Turner”, in which Turner, in sideburns and sharp suit, takes the place of Harry Flowers and orders the thugs to get naked. (As explained in one of the Criterion Blu-ray extras, this also references a Francis Bacon painting.) By this point, we must accept the notion that we’re not in Kansas anymore, or at least not in a realistic narrative, and that sets us up for Performance‘s deliberate stumpery of the metaphysical final scene.
Shrewdly typecast, Mick Jagger performs his heart out in his first film. James Fox acts brilliantly, easily dominating Performance‘s first half with his frightening, swaggering, blistering Cockney persona and not ceding the screen to Jagger in part two. We can see Fox as the model for Ben Kingsley’s scary character in Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), and really for all scary, style-conscious gangsters in cinema since 1970. This must be attributed to the real-life Krays and their rivals and colleagues, who caught the British public’s imaginations in the ’60s much like American bootleggers did in the 1920s and ’30s.
Performance has antecedents. One is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968 while Performance was being made, and whose “trippy” climax is modestly duplicated with a bullet and a photo of Jorge Luis Borges, who’s being read by two characters. The more apparent influences were The Servant (1963), scripted by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey, in which Fox plays a feeble aristocrat who engages in a mystical, identity-switching (or “merging”) folie a deux with his working class butler, and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), another film suggesting that two different characters add up to a single person.
Performance exists in dialogue with these other films, not least in the moment where the faces of James Fox’s Chas and Turner are superimposed on each other. There’s also the trippy moment when, as Chas insists, “I feel like a man” and “I’m normal,” and Pherber mocks him (“That’s terrible”), she holds up a mirror to parts of his body and her own, so that they become sexual split personalities. She declares that Turner is a man in touch with his male and female but has lost touch “with his demon.” This sounds Jungian as all get-out.
Although Performance has been around, for example on a Warner Archive Blu-ray in 2014, Criterion’s 4K digital restoration gives us the UK soundtrack with Shannon’s original vocal performance as Flowers. Warner dubbed it with someone else to make the accent slightly less thick to American ears, and one of Criterion’s extras is a side-by-side presentation of his dialogues.
We also get an excellent documentary on Cammell’s career and a sidebar on a larger-than-life London character, David Litvinoff, who contributed anecdotes and dialogues for the script. He killed himself several years before Cammell did.
The interviews confirm that Performance is primarily Cammell’s baby. He harmoniously co-directed with Roeg, who agreed to shoot if he could co-direct. When Warner insisted on a re-edit, Cammell supervised and did the flash-forwards, flashbacks, flash-sideways, and flash-imaginaries.
While this editing style is commonly associated with Roeg’s films, the primary editor here is Antony Gibbs; he did a truckload of 1960s British New Wave movies, most relevantly those of Richard Lester, such as The Knack and How to Get It (1966). The same temporally dissociative editing style can be see in Lester’s Petulia (1968), edited by Gibbs and, it so happens, shot by Roeg.
Something in the air or water taught us not to trust the linear. Those neural dislocations, along with the meditations on identity, gender, and sex – not to mention the shivery sense of violence and the hip music – all make Performance feel as though it were shot today, if anybody had the guts to make a movie like this.