Performance

Director: Nicolas Roeg, Donald Cammell

Overview

This psychological crime thriller finds Chas (James Fox) as a crook on the run from the law. He hides out at the house of Turner (Mick Jagger), a rocker who lives with Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michelle Breton). Sexual situations and sadism prompted the original X rating, that was later rescinded to R. Randy Newman conducts the music of Jack Nitzsche for this psychedelic psychodrama.

Product Details

Release Date:	01/24/2017
UPC:	0888574462123
Original Release:	1970
Rating:	R
Language:	English
Time:	1:45:00
Sales rank:	35,845

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Mick Jagger	Turner
James Fox	Chas
Anita Pallenberg	Pherber
Michele Breton	Lucy,Actor
Ann Sidney	Dana
John Bundon	Moody
John Bindon	Moody
Stanley Meadows	Rosebloom
Allan Cuthbertson	The Lawyer
Anthony Morton	Dennis
Johnny Shannon	Harry Flowers
Anthony Valentine	Joey Maddocks
Ken Colley	Tony Farrell,Tony Farrell
John Sterland	The Chauffeur
Laraine Wickens	Lorraine
Jack Nitzsche	Composer

Technical Credits

Donald Cammell

Sanford Lieberson	Producer
Donald Cammell	Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

If Hollywood honchos had visions of Performance turning out as some hip version of an Elvis film, they certainly weren’t in sync with either the film’s star or its creators. What co-directors Nicolas Roeg and Donald Camell actually brought to the screen was a fun-house reflection of the tail end of the twisted '60s -- a self-consciously cinematic stew steeped in New Wave film sensibilities, rock 'n' roll decadence, and deliberate narrative ambiguity. Viva Las Vegas this wasn’t. Camell’s screenplay brings together Turner, a rock-star-in-seclusion, and Chas, a vicious criminal on the run. Drawn into Turner’s den of iniquity, Chas experiences a mind-altering transfer of personality with the debauched pop deity. Casting Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger as Turner and familiar actress-cum-Stones girlfriend Anita Pallenberg (who dated both Brian Jones and Keith Richards) as one of his hedonistic hangers-on, Roeg and Camell blurred the line separating their fiction from perceived reality. James Fox, employed against his usual upper-crust type, makes a lingering impression as Chas, the alpha thug whose arrival upends, and is upended by, Turner's idyll. What could have become simply a campy product of its time has aged -- thanks to Roeg’s striking cinematography and Jagger’s charismatic performance -- into a still audacious masterpiece. That contemporary rock 'n' roll remains as besotted with drugs, sex, and criminal activity as it was nearly 40 years ago hurts this film not a bit. For Roeg, Performance remains an early touchstone in a significant film career. As for Jagger, he has never been more effective on screen.