Performance (Goodtimes Entertainment, Warner Bros., 1970)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran my husband Charles two Blu-Ray discs I had ordered from Amazon.com and announced them as “a Mick Jagger double feature” since he’s in both of them. The first was Performance, made in 1970 (or at least released then: for some reason I had been under the impression that it was filmed in 1968 but not released for two years, but there’s a reference in the film’s dialogue to 1969 as if this were a recently passed year) and co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. The credits specify that Cammell wrote the script solo, Roeg was the cinematographer, and the two directed together. The plot of Performance, to the extent it has one, deals with Chas (James Fox), an enforcer for a gang of London extortionists who have decided that his services are no longer required. It seems that his bosses have gone into a major rebranding of their operations, so instead of running a classic “protection” racket and extorting money from small shop owners and trashing their businesses if they don’t pay up, they will present themselves as entrepreneurs bringing about “mergers” between themselves and smaller businesses in the name of economic efficiency. Chas’s old-fashioned methods are jeopardizing their attempt to rebrand themselves, though, so they send a crew of four enforcers of their own to smash up Chas’s flat and torture and kill him. Among the things they do to his apartment is bring a can of red spray paint and spray “Poof!” on his wall. “Poof” is the British equivalent of the American term “fag” – a vicious and insulting slor against Gay men – and though we know that Chas is not literally Gay (the first thing we saw him do in this film is have sex with a woman, who spends the night at his place and tries to get him breakfast – which he angrily refuses and throws her out),

it sets up a curious anticipation of perversity which Cammell deposits ini his cliché bank for later. Chas manages to escape, and following a lead given to him by a Black street musician he runs into, he shows up at the home of Turner (Mick Jagger), a reclusive former rock star who retired and hid out in his house because he had lost his inspiration and now doesn’t even like music anymore. Though Jagger gets second billing in the film itself and top billing on the original trailer, he doesn’t appear until the film is over an h our into its 108-minute running time. Turner is living in his palatial apartment with two women, Pherber (Anita Pallenberg, then the girlfriend of Jagger’s fellow Rolling Stone Keith Richards) and Lucy (Michèle Breton). When Turner is initially reluctant to rent Chas the room, Chas tells Turner that he is an artist himself, a juggler named “John Dean” (not to be confused with the real-life John Dean who became the whistle-blower who brought down Richard Nixon over Watergate). Pherber feeds Chas a mushroom, which Chas at first assumes is just an ordinary mushroom but we are well aware is actually a psychedelic one which will get him high. The three of them play with each other, with Turner performing a cover version of Robert Johnson’s “Cone On in My Kitchen” on vocal and acoustic guitar. But in order to get it to his contacts, Chas has arranged with an intermediary to get on a secret flight to the United States, but in order to do that he needs a passport photo – and Turner and his crew take one for him. Alas, the whole scheme is being masterminded by the gangsters who are still out to kill Chas, and at the end of the movie he gets into a white Rolls-Royce with them and Chas faces his imminent death with the stoicism of The Swede in Ernest Hemingway’s story “The Killers” or James Cagney’s character at theend of the 1934 film He Was Her Man.

Before that happens, Chas has found himself in bed with Lucy – just after we’ve seen Lucy and Pherber having some Lesbian goings-on of hteir own. When Chas complained about hwo flat-chested “lucy” was I immediately thought that Donald Cammell was going to have Turner sneak into Chas’s bed and start making out with him – thereby turning him into what his gangland assailants had accused him of being in the fiurst place – only even for a film this audacious, obviously having Mick Jagger, of all people, in a sex scene with another man was too mich even for Cammell and Roeg. At the end, just before he leaves,Chas fires his gun and either shoots Turner or just shoots out a painting of him – Roeg’s camera doesn’t linger long enough for us to tell which, and Cammell’s script hasn’t bothered to give us a motive for Chas to kill Turner, assuming that’s what he did. When I looked up Performance on imdb.com the review that came up was a five-paragraph rave by someone who bought into the idea that because this film was deliberately and maddeningly obscure, therefore it most have been a profound parable on the meaning of human existence. The film’s poster art made it look like James Fox and Mick Jagger literally traded appearances – which they sort-of do: Fox dons a long-haired wig as part of his escape plan and Jagger slicks down his hair and, for a music-video sequence of a song called “Memo from Turner,” he briefly appears as the chair of a corporate board meeting. I’m wondering if this was intended as a what-if sequence showing how Jagger’s life might have gone if he’d stayed in the London School of Economics (John Maynard Keynes’ alma mater), graduated there and gone into the London business world.

Performance is very much a film of its time, and though it’s nice to see Mick Jagger back when he was still relatively attractive, there’s an irony in which one of the women says, “I wonder what he’ll be like when he’s 50.” Now we know, and it isn’t pretty. There are some nice bits in Performance, including the musical score – mostly Ry Cooder’s acoustic slide guitar in a remarkably good imitation of the Delta blues style, along with a couple of good soul performances by Black singer Merry Clayton (who sang the scorching second vocal on the Stones’ original recording of “Gimmie Shelter” and was screwed out of the major soul career she should have had because of a dispute over her contract between Columbia and Lou Adler’s Ode Records). But mostly Performance os a maddening film that seems to revel in its own obscurity and meaninglessness.