She lives there with Turner, a reclusive, eccentric former rock star who has 'lost his demon', and Lucy, with whom he enjoys a non-possessive and bisexual ménage à trois.
[citation needed] At one stage, Cammell's friend Marlon Brando (with whom he later collaborated on the posthumously published novel Fan Tan) was to play the gangster role of 'Chas'.
[3] The theories put forward by Antonin Artaud, on the links between performing and madness, also influenced Cammell, who—along with co-director Nicolas Roeg—was mainly responsible for the 'look' of the film.
It also benefited from a lack of interference from studio executives at Warner Bros., who believed they were getting a Rolling Stones equivalent of The Beatles' playful A Hard Day's Night (1964).
The film was shelved by Ken Hyman, head of Warner Brothers, when he concluded that no amount of editing, re-looping, or re-scheduling would cover up the fact that the picture ultimately made no sense.
When the film was first released in the United States, the voices of a number of the actors in key roles were dubbed because the studio had feared that Americans would find their Cockney accents difficult to understand.
[citation needed] Different edits were shown around the world, with the film gaining a following through to the late 1970s, by which time a variety of versions of varying quality could be seen in a handful of independent cinemas around London.
Those in attendance included Fox (and family), Pallenberg, set designer Christopher Gibbs and Cammell's brother, who introduced part of a video interview with Donald, shot just before his death.
In 2003, the British Film Institute financed a new print of Performance, which was premiered at the recently refurbished Electric Cinema in Portobello Road in London's Notting Hill (with an incognito Pallenberg in attendance).
An individual member of a group of stalwart London based fans of the movie (which included the journalist Mick Brown) worked to ensure that any eventual DVD release was not merely a straight 'VHS to DVD' transfer of the dubbed VHS version (as was often the policy of Warner Bros. at the time) by making sure Warner Home Video (London) were fully aware of the new BFI-financed print.
[8] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it a 'pretentious and repellent little film' that 'cannot rise above the world it pretends to examine'.
[9] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, writing that the first 40 minutes 'crackle with excitement', but then 'the pace slows down considerably, the nudity tires and the growing attraction of Fox for Jagger is unprepared for'.
[10] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film was suggestive of 'Mickey Spillane trying to write like Harold Pinter' and that filmmakers Cammell and Roeg had done a 'fundamentally rotten' job, regularly 'upstaging the action and the actors with tricky (and often unintelligible) sound recording and 'striking' composition.
[15] In an introduction before the film's screening on Sky Indie, Quentin Tarantino cited Performance as 'one of the best rock movies of all time.'
He praised James Fox's performance as his favourite British gangster portrayal in cinema, and expressed admiration for the film's exploration of the darker side of the 1960s psychedelic dream.
The site's consensus reads: 'Performance is an exuberant and grimy ode to the sexual revolution, evoking cultural upheaval and identity crisis with rock 'n' roll verve and a beguiling turn by Mick Jagger.
'[18] Several aspects of Performance were novel, and it foreshadowed MTV-type music videos (particularly the sequence with "Memo from Turner", in which Jagger sings) and many popular films of the 1990s and 2000s.