Pretentious? Maybe. Violent? Definitely. With the Rolling Stone playing a washed-up rock star, 'Performance' was a death rattle for the 1960s. And it's still controversial, writes Donald Clarke
'There was so much hashish being smoked and so much acid being dropped it's hard to remember the decade, let alone the film," the designer Christopher Gibbs said of his time working on the deliciously decadent 1970 movie Performance.
Thirty-four years later, as a diligently restored new print is unveiled at the Irish Film Institute, a fug of hemp-scented indulgence still hangs about the film. But few intelligent critics would view the picture, the débuts of its co-directors, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, as an artefact of the hippy era. It is too nasty, too dangerous and too pessimistic for that. Closer in spirit to the works of William Burroughs than to those of, say, Carlos Castaneda, Performance, though shot as early as 1968, echoes with the death rattles of a decade whose promises would prove to be unfulfilled in the era of the three-day week. It is, as the argot of the time might have it, a downer.
The film stars Mick Jagger as a reclusive, washed-up rock star who shares his crumbling Notting Hill Gate pad with two airy, sexually flexible European girls. His life changes when a taut hoodlum, played with coiled menace by James Fox, rents the basement room. Drugs are taken and the two men, each of whom feels the other to be in possession of complementary powers to his own, find their identities mingling.
Even now critics are divided about the film's merits. Earlier this month David Thomson described it in the Independent On Sunday as the first properly pretentious film made in Britain. In the same day's Observer Philip French mused that it was "our greatest gangster film". Speaking on the phone from London, where he now heads a body aimed at promoting the city's film industry, Performance's producer, Sandy Lieberson, seems delighted that the film is still a subject of controversy.
Back in the mid-1960s the American-born Lieberson was working as an agent with Creative Management Associates, handling the affairs of such diverse figures as Richard Harris, Peter Sellers, Sergio Leone and, crucially, the Rolling Stones. When Cammell, an eccentric portrait painter and aspiring film-maker who was one of his obscurer clients, produced a weird script about identity, madness and the consequences of sexual licence Lieberson saw a possibility to move in to film production.
Having talked Jagger in to the idea, he approached Warner Brothers, which, it transpired, was eager to finance a project built around one of the most famous human beings of the age.
"You know, it makes you think that they never read the screenplay," Lieberson laughs. "You have to remember that it was the 1960s, and anything went then.So, strangely enough, it was relatively easy to raise the money. They didn't object to anything in the screenplay. It was only later, when they saw how that screenplay was represented, that they began to object."
Cammell, who had little experience behind a camera, suggested to Lieberson that Roeg, at that stage one of the country's most distinguished cinematographers, might like to co-direct the film. It was an unconventional idea, but Lieberson saw the merits of having such an experienced brain on the set - Performance launched Roeg in to a directing career that later took in such classics as Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell To Earth.
Given the contrast between the two directors' subsequent professional lives - Cammell directed only a couple more films before committing suicide, in 1996 - it is unsurprising that some have suggested that Roeg must have taken most of the important artistic decisions. But Lieberson is adamant that Cammell was no passenger and that directing duties were evenly shared. It was, however, the producer who was responsible for massaging the ego of the occasionally recalcitrant Jagger.
"Well, I knew him reasonably well," Lieberson says. "But it was difficult, because he was a very mercurial character and was very insecure about acting in a movie. So it took a lot of coaxing to get him to turn up. Once he got there, though, he didn't want to leave." He says this with an ironic flourish. So was there, as Christopher Gibbs implied, a party atmosphere on set? "Well, usually just off the set."
The shoot created tensions among the top brass of the Rolling Stones. Keith Richards didn't much care for this acting lark and urged Jagger not to go anywhere near the picture. Flames were further fanned when the guitarist's then girlfriend, the austere Anita Pallenberg, was cast as one of the two young women who share Jagger's house, bed and, in the film's most iconic scene, bath.
In contrast to Lieberson's recollections, Pallenberg remembers Roeg shouldering more than his share of the directorial burden. "Donald was a real prima donna," she said in a recent interview. "He would go in to fits of rage and then disappear, while Nic Roeg would spend seven hours lighting one shot as we waited in the basement. I was often so stoned that even though I wrote my own dialogue I didn't know whether or not I had done my lines."
Alongside Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, Performance has come to be seen as a useful record of life as it was lived by those lucky enough to have been a very precise age at a very precise time in a very precise place. But does it really have any anthropological value? Were such films, with their depictions of densely populated love romps and promiscuous chemical experimentation, reflecting a reality or just building contemporary myths? "Yeah. That is how Mick Jagger lived then," Lieberson says. "I mean, he wasn't a recluse. But the feeling is very accurately depicted and represented. It was full of sex and drugs and violence and rock 'n' roll. That was all exploding on the scene at the time."
It all proved too much for Warner Brothers, which reacted with horror to an early cut of the film. Not only was it packed full of sex and drugs, but the future Sir Mick, without whose presence the film would barely have secured a penny of finance, did not show his face until halfway through. (The first section of the film, researched with the assistance of the notorious David Litvinoff, a former associate of the Krays, features a brilliantly sleazy and unsettling evocation of the era's criminal underworld.)
"Warner's certainly objected to the sexuality," Lieberson says. "They said it made them feel dirty. It was offensive and unorthodox. They didn't want that kind of sexual ambiguity and relationships in a film they were to distribute. And they objected to the violence."
The studio moved the editing from London to Los Angeles so it could keep a closer eye on developments. Fifteen minutes was stripped from the picture, but, in truth, if you cut out all the sex and violence there would be barely enough left for a trailer, let alone a feature.
Several myths have developed about the first major test screening, in Santa Monica. It has been suggested that one of the executives' wives was so appalled that she vomited in to her handbag, if we are to believe more extreme versions.
"I didn't see anybody actually vomit," Lieberson says. "But it was an uproarious preview, and we eventually had to stop the film about a third of the way through. People were outraged and demanded their money back. It was a pretty hairy night, especially for a new producer who wasn't sure what he was doing. But look at Performance now: it's a good film, but it looks pretty damn tame."
Warner, which as a member of the Motion Picture Association was not encouraged to distribute X-rated films, tried to bury Performance by releasing only a handful of prints in the late summer. It was assisted by the US critics, who were, for the most part, almost as appalled as the studio. Roeg still treasures the notice from Time magazine, in which Richard Schickel pronounced Performance "the most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seensince I began reviewing".
But British reviewers were impressed. When it eventually arrived in London, in 1971, three years after it was shot, it was immediately recognised as a messy, extravagant masterpiece. By this stage the city had ceased to swing, and Performance worked as a reminder of wilder times while, in its violent, ambiguous denouement, offering explanations about why the party had to end.
James Fox, whose tense, controlled performance was vital to the film's appeal, found God and retired from acting for close to a decade. Some have suggested that it was his experience making the film that made him turn away from show business. But Lieberson believes the story is more complicated.
"I think he is genuinely proud of Performance now," he says. "He went through a personal crisis when the movie was over. His father died and he was disoriented. He found religion and that gave him a stability in life. It took a while for him to reconcile his religious beliefs with his desire to be a professional actor. But the saddest story was really that of Donald Cammell."
Born in to the Cammell Laird shipbuilding empire and allegedly a godson of the occult guru Aleister Crowley, Cammell had a deeply troubled time after Performance. He never prospered in Hollywood, shooting himself after the butchering of his splendidly unhinged 1995 film Wild Side.
The British Film Institute's new print of Performance, which restores sections of dialogue redubbed in the original release, is a suitable memorial to Cammell. It is also a fascinating record of the first skirmishes between mainstream Hollywood and the burgeoning 1960s counterculture.
As studio chiefs couldn't understand what their children's generation was up to they were forced, through sheer ignorance, to allow certain freedoms. After all, as Easy Rider later demonstrated, this stuff might have been weird, but it made money. A decade later, following the unwelcome rise of George Lucas, the balance of power had shifted back to the artistically conservative. Grim and disturbing as it often is, Performance offers us a memo from a time when film-makers felt that anything might be possible.
Performance opens at the Irish Film Institute, in Dublin, today
