Though released in 1970, Performance was filmed in 1968 and represents the dark inside of the 1960s experimental mix of fame, sex, drugs and pop music. Made by an 'insider' from the counter-culture (Donald Cammell), it is partly inspired by painting (Francis Bacon) and literature (Jorge Luis Borges). Its real theme concerns identity and power. Generically it can be seen as a gangster film mixed with the pop musical. Most of its action takes place over a very hard day's night indeed, compared with the innocent antics of the clean cut beatles of
Actually the themes that Performance explores can be linked with a genre in the late 1950s that we see in films like Expresso Bongo (Cliff Richard's first film), and The Frightened City (with Connery before his Bond days). These films depicted characters from London's underworld running night clubs and exploiting young talent. A Hard Day's Night turned away from this by focusing on the ordinary, homely innocence of the 'fab four'.
But in Performance we have come full circle ... though an important switch from the old genre is that the representatives of youth and pop music are no longer victims. Instead the gangster figure, Chas, is manipulated by the reclusive pop star - though not in the way that anyone might expect. Here is an extract from Mick Brown's introduction to his A to Z book on the film (Bloomsbury Movie Guide No. 6, 1999):
thought it was getting a “youth market” movie, but was unprepared for one that actually reflected the more extreme tastes, mores and enthusiasms of that market.
Only after filming had begun did Warner executives begin to express doubts about the film's volatile contents, their nervousness increasing almost by the day, to the point where filming was actually halted and the fate of the project hung in the balance.
`The film is simply about an idea,' Donald Cammell told the film-critic Derek Malcolm in an interview published in the Guardian in 1970, shortly before the British release of Performance. `It's a movie that gets into an allegorical area and it moves from a definition of what violence is to an explanation of a way of being. It is an attempt, maybe successful and maybe not, to use a film for exploring the nature of violence as seen from the point of view of an artist. It says that this crook leads this fading pop star to realise that violence is a facet of creative art, that his energy is derived from the same sources of those as the crook. And that that energy is always dangerous, sometimes fatal.'
Performance took its spirit from the London milieu of which its director and principal players were all a part: the intersection at which the worlds of rock music, the new aristocracy - and crime - collided. Marianne Faithfull would describe it as `an allegory of libertine Chelsea life in the late 60s, with its baronial rock stars, wayward jeunesse doree, drugs, sex and decadence'.
It was a film galvanised by the relationships, both on and off screen, of its principals. Cammell, Fox and Jagger were all close friends. Cammell had lived in menages d trois, at different times, with both Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton. At the time of making the film, Pallenberg was the lover of Keith Richard, Jagger's fellow Rolling Stone and closest friend. It is this intermingling of relationships that has led to Performance being described, with some justification, as “the most expensive home movie ever made”.
The film was sold to Warner Bros on the basis of a skimpy treatment about a chance meeting between a rock star and a gangster. There was no proper script: Cammell hadn't written one. He began the film not knowing how it would end, and would later claim that even halfway through shooting he had no clear idea who would live and who would die.
Cammell had scripted two films before Performance but had no experience as a director. Nor did his co-director, Nic Roeg, although he was an experienced and highly respected cinematographer. Performance was also the first film for its producer, Sanford `Sandy' Lieberson. It is difficult to imagine any major film company these days allowing such an inexperienced team the degree of freedom which Warner afforded Lieberson, Cammell and Roeg in 1968. Warner's willingness to forgo the normal checks and balances can only be understood in the context of the times.
While it had been a full three years since Time magazine had decreed London as “swinging”, the myth was still abroad in Hollywood (and hard though it may be to believe, Warner thought Performance was going to be a “Swinging London” film). The success of the Beatles' films Help and A Hard Day'sNight had made pop stars a valuable commercial commodity in film as well as music. And Mick Jagger was the biggest rock star of the day, bar none. (Such was Warner's enthusiasm for Jagger that they attempted to contract him as a “youth advisor” to the company on the back of the Performance deal. The proposal was quietly dropped when the film was completed.) In short, Warners
magazine in America and the British underground newspaper IT saw fit to offer public health warnings, cautioning their readers not to watch Performance while tripping on LSD.
Extraordinarily, the intervening years have done nothing to diminish the impact of Performance. It remains as dazzling, provocative and thought-provoking now as it did thirty years ago - a film which traps "a whole era under glass" certainly, but which transcends the age in which it was made by virtue of its singularity and its brilliance, and which has continued to exercise a powerful fascination on successive generations as one of the greatest British films, of any kind, of all time.
When, at last, the film was delivered to the studio it was received with shudders of apprehension. At a test screening in Santa Monica members of the audience walked out of the theatre in protest. Legend has it that the wife of one studio executive actually threw up. Warner Bros refused to release the film without substantial cuts and re-editing, and it was to be two years before it was eventually released for public exhibition. By that time its cult-status was already assured.
Performance was given its world premiere in New York on 30 July 1970, heralded by an advertisement in the Village Voice showing pictures of Jagger in rock-star and gangster guise, alongside copy which read: `Somewhere in your head there's a wild electric dream. Come see it in Performance, where underground meets underworld.
The film was greeted by cries of bewilderment and outrage from critics. John Simon, writing in the New York Times, wondered if it wasn't "the most loathsome film of all", while Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice described it as "the most deliberately decadent film I have ever seen". Both Rolling Stone
