Celebrate Mick Jagger's 68th Birthday with His Performance in Performance
Sixty-eight years ago today, a Hirschfeld caricature named Mick Jagger was born. In addition to inventing our current perception of rock stars, the Rolling Stones frontman has produced some of the darkest material ever to permeate the mainstream. While you could revisit the harrowing Altamont doc Gimme Shelter or Martin Scorsese's 2008 concert film Shine a Light to celebrate Mick's special occasion, Movieline is instead turning back to Mick's performance in the once-abhorred, now-revered 1970 movie Performance. Check out the slickest Mick ever ahead!
Director Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's portrait of the swingin' sixties gives us grit, Mick's fun performance as a former rock star, the sultry Anita Pallenberg, James Fox as gang soldier Chas (in a role originally slated for Marlon Brando), and one great musical number called "Memo From Turner" (which Martin Scorsese put to great use as well in the final 10 minutes of Goodfellas). Sure, this movie didn't quit shake up the universe like Exile on Main Street, but it's an astounding little curio. Happy birthday, Mick!
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I love Performance, but Keith Richards's bit in _Life_ about Cammell's "set-up" between Jagger and Pallenberg is possibly the best thing that ever came out of it:
"I felt things through the wind. I knew Mouche -- Michele Breton, the third one in the bath scene in the movie; I'm not totally out of this frame -- who used to be paid to 'perform' as a couple with her boyfriend. Anita told me Michele had to have Valium shots before every take. So [Cammell] was basically setting up third-rate porn. He had a good story in _Performance_. He got the only movie of any interest in his life because of who was in it, and Nic Roeg, who shot it, and James Fox, who he drove round the bend [...] I met Cammell later in L.A., and I said, you know, I can't think of anybody, Donald, that's ever got any joy out of you, and I don't know if you've ever got any joy out of yourself. There's nowhere else to go, there's nobody. The best thing you can do is take the gentleman's way out. And this was at least two or three years before he finally topped himself."