PERFORMANCE

Chas Devlin, strongarm man for the expanding business organisation headed by Harry Flowers, enjoys his work and the fringe benefits: fast cars, fast women and power. Knowing Chas to have a personal grudge against bettingshop owner Joey Maddocks, Flowers orders him to keep out of the organisation's bid to coerce him into a merger. But Chas disobeys and, duly merged, Maddocks wrecks his fiat and beats him severely before Chas grabs a gun and kills him. On the run from both the police and the organisation, Chas overhears a touring musician mention and address and impulsively introduces himself at the Notting Hill house as an outofwork juggler and friend of the musician. The owner Turner is a retired pop star now living involuntary and eccentric retreat with his junkie girlfriend Pherber and her French girlfriend Lucy Chas' contempt for the trio is tempered by his need for their protection and, more specifically, for their help in obtaining a passport photograph for him, while they, delightedly guessing that he's a gangster decide to "get inside his mind". Already confused, Chas disintegrates under drugs, while Turner is moved to offer him his first performance in years. Next morning Flowers' boys have traced him to the house. Chas insists on telling Turner that he is leaving, and when Turner begs to go with him, Chas shoots him in the face before being escorted to the waiting car for his last ride.

"Hesse, Norman O. Brown and Artaud. But what is admirable about Performance is not the fact that Donald Cammell should have written a script under the influence of such dauntingly heavyweight writers, but that he and his codirector Nicolas Roeg should have succeeded in creating a purely cinematic language for expressing their ideas. For Performance is not a mystical essay but a film, relying entirely on what it shows, what we see, to suggest the working of less visible forces. It has a witty script terse, abrasive and devastatingly accurate for the scenes in the gangster milieu, more flowery and incoherent for the conversations inside Turner's private Katmandu. Visually stunning, the opening 'thriller' section is intentionally ugly glaring metallic surfaces and harsh colours held together in a flashy editing style that is a stylistic equivalent of Chas' gangster world that explodes in sudden surrealist images of blood and feathers as Maddocks wrecks his flat; while from the moment Chas steps through Turner's door, the style becomes softer a reflection of his more elegant environment with its billowing oriental draperies." (Jan Dawson, "Monthly Film Bulletin", n. 445, February 1971, p. 28)

Director: Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg.
Screenplay: Donald Cammell.
Fotografia (Technicolor): Nicolas Roeg.
Editor: Anthony Gibbs.
Art director: John Clark, Peter Young.
Music: Jack Nitzsche.
Songs: "Performance" e "Poor White Hound Dog" interpretata da Merry Clayton, "Turner's Murder" interpretata dai Merry Clayton Singers, "Dyed, Dead, Red" interpreta da Buffy SainteMarie, "Wake Up, Niggers" interpretata dai Last Poets, "Gone Dead Train" interpretata da Randy Newman, "Memo from Turner" interpretata da Mick Jagger.
Sound: Alan Pattillo.
Cast: Jannes Fox (Chas Devlin), Mick Jagger (Turner), Anita Pallenberg (Pherber), Michèle Breton (Lucy), Anna Sidney (Dana), John Bindon (Moody), Stanley Meadows (Rosebloom), Allan Cuthbertson (l'avvocato), Antony Morton (Dennis), Johnny Shannon (Harry Flowers), Anthony Valentine (Joey Maddocks), Ken Colley (Tony Farrell), John Sterland (l'autista), Laraine Wickens (Lorraine).
Production company: Sanford Lieberson, Donald Cammell per la Goodtimes Enterprises.