“Even the bathwater is dirty,” complained one outraged Warner Bros executive after an early screening of Performance in 1968. He wasn’t alone in his condemnation: none of the Board was impressed with Roeg and Cammell’s heady brew of sex, violence and psychology and, consequently, the movie was put on the shelf for over two years, finally emerging at the end of 1970.
It’s hardly surprising that the suits reacted like that — Hollywood was only just starting, very reluctantly, to get ‘with it’. Over the next few years, pretty much all of the major studios dabbled falteringly with edgier movies that exuded a new permissiveness, but they got it wrong as often as they got it right.
That said, for a movie so rooted in a sixties exploration of crime and sexual identity, Performance was also way ahead of its time, something that must have also shocked Warner Bros. Catching a recent showing on late night TV, I switched on several minutes in, during the torture of gangster Chas (James Fox), and briefly thought I was watching something contemporary. The blend of brutality and perversity is still jarring, the cold stare at decadence still alarming. The visual style, too, places Performance outside its time. Its restless editing reflects experimental cinema, years before it was assimilated into the mainstream. And a disguised Fox, with sunglasses and dyed red hair, looks like a precursor of The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Fox got so caught up in his character as Chas, a London hood forced to hide out in the Notting Hill townhouse of bisexual rock star Turner (Mick Jagger), that it tipped him over the edge, and he quit acting for ten years. Such is the intensity of his character’s immersion, in, first, the brutal London underworld and, then, the drug-fuelled sex games of Jagger’s milieu, it is not difficult to see why. The gradual fusion of Chas and Turner (and of Jagger and Fox) through hallucinogenic drugs, mind games and role play, goes beyond performance: it becomes an excavation of their corrupted souls.
‘Shocking’ films have been ten a penny since the late sixties. Indeed, they appear with an almost comforting regularity. But truly daring films, like Performance, are very rare indeed.
Featurette "Influence and Controversy" (25 mins approx)
1970 Vintage Featurette "Memo from Turner" (5 mins approx).
Film Description
An over-zealous and violent fixer for the Mob holes up in a Notting Hill basement of a reclusive, indulgent rock star when he needs a place to lie low for a while. There, helped by a large chunk of fly agaric, his personality starts to change and fuse with the musician. An outstanding exploration of identity that is a sort of distant cousin to Celine and Julie Go Boating. Jagger's 'Memo from Turner' is a powerful musical highlight of the film, which also led to James Fox giving up with films completely for the best part of a decade.
