See them all in a film about fantasy. And reality. Vice. And versa.

Performance (1970) is an era-defining film, a dark, sexy

portrayal of 60s rock ‘n’ roll and the East End gangster underworld, which makes more contemporary directors like Guy Ritchie’s gangster films pall in comparison. Though visually and musically exciting, and with star performances from the central characters, the film reveals the darker, rotten layer of Sixties bohemia. The main characters are all suffering identity crises, as the dream of the decade comes to a sharp decline. As identities merge and intertwine, mainly that of rock-star Turner, and the East End gangster Chas (pitched perfectly by James Fox), the film seems to challenge perceived notions of masculinity and sexuality. With its mixture of Kray-inspired gangsterism and rock ‘n’ roll psychedelia, Performance is an immensely influential film on the British gangster genre.

The fluidity of identity between the characters is one of the central themes of the film. Chas and Turner are frequently merged and contrasted, and the title ‘Performance’ comes from the fact that a ‘performer’ is both a gangster and a rock star. Their faces are merged, and each adopts various superficial identities. Mirrors, wigs, make-up, hair-dying, the taking of mind-enhancing and reality-altering drugs; these are all symbolic aspects of the changing nature of identity and uniting dualities –straight and gay, man and woman.

Turner’s loss of his artistic ‘demon’ reveals another facet of identity-loss, seemingly a reference to the Hispanic concept of ‘duende’, the artistic demon that fights with and challenges the artist, creating dark, beautiful art. The film reviewer Paul Huckerby relates this to John Landau's contemporary Rolling Stone article, in which Landau noted in criticism of the generally well-received Their Satanic Majesties Request, released in 1967, the Stones had ‘...been far too influenced by their musical inferiors and the result is an insecure album in which they try too hard to prove that they too are innovators, and that they too can say something new. [It is] an identity crisis of the first order’. The Stones at that point, had if you like, “lost their demon”, and Performance picks up on this in a subtle way. Anita Pallenberg’s allusion to Turner’s ‘duende’ also ties in with the central literary influence of the film, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges’s The South is read aloud hypnotically by Turner, and the gangsters are also seen to be reading a Borges collection.

Mick Jagger as Turner, doing what he does best.

Both Performance and also Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) reveal a concern with the gangster’s masculine performativity. In a similar way to the wearing of hoodies, clothing in these films takes on an iconographic importance. Clothing, however, is here equated with wealth, status and style in order to, as Moya Luckett notes (2000), “specifically articulate dandyism in relation to social changes affecting young white men”. The central Notting Hill hippy characters reveal typically sixties dandy characteristics that look firmly back to the Romantics, as well as turn-of-the-century occultists, such as, for example, W.B.Yeats and Aleister Crowley (Cammell’s father was Crowley’s biographer). Turner also relates the mythical story of Hasan-i-Sabbah and his hashishin or assassins (most famously told by Marco Polo). These assassins committed numerous murders in order to be allowed to return to their drugged garden paradise. Here both the Manson murders of ‘69 and Tennyson’s poem The Lotus-Eaters spring firmly to mind.

Sexuality in Performance is, typically of the period, fluid, interchangeable, but also destructive. Shots of Chas being whipped by an East End gangster are contrasted with shots of a lover scratching Chas’s back – sex and violence are here being inextricably linked in a sado-masochistic way that alludes to further Decadent literary figures like Leopold Sacher-Masoch (who is curiously related, it is claimed, to Marianne Faithful, Jagger’s partner at the time), and Algernon Charles Swinburne. However, the scene of Chas being whipped by an East End gangster also picks up on the repetitive undercurrents of homosexuality. Chas’s extreme performance becomes a way of veiling his queerness, while Turner’s veil of androgynous dandyism can be seen as a way of veiling his dangerous masculinity. The first half of the film focuses on Chas and his workings with the Flower brothers. This East End gang bears notable similarities with the Kray brothers, who were twin, homosexual, East End gangsters and the foremost organised crime leaders in London’s East End during the Fifties and Sixties. The Kray brothers were granted life imprisonment in 1969 (Performance was released a year after). Sexual symbolism reoccurs in the film, for example in one scene where the focuses on Chas’s belly as Pallenberg’s character Pherber kisses it, and cuts it with a shot of (what I assume is) Pallenberg’s vagina. Chas, however, is repulsed by and rejects the voluptuous female sexuality of Pherber, favouring the boyish androgyny of Michèle Breton. The gang or the ‘firm’ is clearly portrayed as a homosocial space. Women are portrayed as a threat to this space, although the gangster Chas’s entry into the hippy world of Notting Hill with its sexual and gender ambiguity is also portrayed as a threat.

As Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy observe in British Crime Cinema (1999), the working-class gangster embodies ‘old’ England, and is pitted against a new, increasingly sexualised ‘new’ England, thus appealing to a particular strand of Thatcherite traditionalism which was concerned with the decline of family and nation. The working-class character George in Bob Hoskins’s Mona Lisa (1987) is one such example. As Alexander Walker (1985) notes, “public terrorism came to London in the first year of the Seventies” and “was reflected in films which put the emphasis of interest on the criminal anti-hero, stripped of political motives”. Chas’s violent criminal activity is intercut with scenes from the Old Bailey Trial; these contrasting images suggest that gangsterdom and the law are both equally corrupt.

Guy Ritchie’s Snatch (2000) and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) adopt much of the postmodern violence of American director Quentin Tarantino, and reveal much of the British tendency to adopt Hollywood styles. British gangster films may have adopted a Hollywood model, but they add a decidedly British inflection. In the 1980’s, for example, this involved allegorizing the nation as a way of commenting on the social and economic dangers which were characteristic of the era. In Margaret Thatcher’s last years of power, two gangster films were released which can be viewed as allegories of Thatcherism: Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and Peter Medake’s The Krays (1990). Greenaway’s film specifically can be seen as a critique of the ruthlessness of business and economy in the Thatcher era.

British gangster films often present us with a recurring theme of much British cinema –the triumph of the small man in the face of impersonal economic forces. Ken Loach’s recent film Looking For Eric (2009) involves a sub-plot with a vicious drug-dealing gangster who blackmails Eric’s 19 year old son into carrying his gun. The end of the film involves a victorious act of criminality and thuggery against the vicious gangster, which in turn celebrates the triumph of the small man.

Nicolas Roeg’s Performance is an immensely influential ‘cult’ film that is by no means perfect. Weaknesses in the plot direction and less-than-perfect acting on Jagger’s part are, refreshingly, irrelevant. Jagger and Pallenberg are immensely convincing as washed-out bohemian drug users, and James Fox’s portrayal of Chas, arguably the best East End gangster on film, was so well researched that, it is rumoured, he became a Christian as a result of it. Like some of the best gangster films, Performance has a touching fatalism at its core. Turner echoes Hasan-i-Sabbah’s last words: ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted’ – a perfect description of Sixties bohemia at it’s best, but it also contains an unbearable sense of the irrelevance of wasted life– if nothing is true, then what’s the point?