Regarding James Fox

The hard-man gangster Chas is played by James Fox. I've sometimes mixed him up with another British actor named Fox, Edward Fox. A little Googling on James Fox took me to a website where I learned that James and Edward Fox are brothers. Well.


Down in James Fox's bio are some notes about "Performance."

"Fox left the acting profession for nine years (1970-79) after he filmed Performance (1970) with Mick Jagger. A combination of his father's recent death, the strain of filming and smoking the hallucinogen DMT with Mick Jagger led to a nervous breakdown. Fox subsequently joined a religious cult known as "The Navigators".

...

"Personal Quotes
"[On his 9-year break from acting]: People think Performance (1970) blew my mind... my mind was blown long before that.
Performance (1970) gave me doubts about my way of life. Before that I had been completely involved in the more bawdy side of the film business. But after that everything changed.

NY Times remembers our movie

The NY Times gives a pretty good review to the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, but one actor gets a thumbs-down: Keith Richards. The Times reviewer, Jeannette Catsoulis, may be a fan of our movie, since she advises Richards to get a copy of "Performance" and do as Jagger does. Here's the link.

Link to useful website

A friend passes along this link to a literary website on Borges with plenty of meat about "Performance."

Second Post -- Borges in some detail

It is with some regret that I start to explain a mystery of this movie. Now I won’t have to churn my mind about something I saw on the screen – won’t be churning it endlessly with no result, because in fact, I couldn’t figure it out. Well, in fact, I couldn’t figure it out. I found the solution in a book. It’s not the same as figuring it out, is it? So my regret at publishing it here is less.

Now, what was the mystery? Well, in one scene Turner is quoting something from a book. Must be important. What’s the book? Who’s the author? Then one of the gangsters, the smiling mild one, is sitting in the back seat of the Rover saloon car reading a book. What’s the book? Who’s the author? When the bullet roars into action, there’s a tunnel with the face of a middle-aged man in it. Who’s the man?

The new DVD version of “Performance” has added features that explain some of what was in these mysteries. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine author who was coming into world renown in the 1960s, is identified as the author. His book is in the movie. His face is in the tunnel and on the cover of the book the gangster is reading. The book is “A Personal Anthology” -- by Borges.

Today I went downtown to the main public library and checked out a biography of Borges by Edwin Williamson, an Oxford professor of Spanish. “Performance” appears in the index. I opened to p. 396-7 and read about of the atmosphere surrounding Borges as he traveled in Britain in 1971, the year after the movie came out:

“Borges’s work had reached a peak of popular acclaim by this time. The anthology of his stories and essays that Penguin brought out in Britain in 1970 under the title “Labyrinths” had achieved cult status. Borges’s name, moreover, had already become associated with the New Wave in European cinema after several famous French directors – Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais – had cited his work in a number of films in the 1960s. But in 1970 this association of Borges with the movies had reached unprecedented heights with the release of two films that were to become international box-office hits. “The Spider’s Stratagem,” by the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, was a version of Borges’s story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero,” and the film won critical acclaim at the Venice and New York film festivals of that year. Another film, “Performance,” directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell and starring Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, was to turn Borges, rather improbably, into something of an icon for the cultural vanguard of ‘swinging London.’ The film paid homage to Borges in several ways – Mick Jagger is heard quoting from “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “The South,” twice Borges’s photograph appears on the jacket of his “Personal Anthology,” and at the very end, when Jagger is shot by the gangster played by James Fox, an image of Borges flashes on screen for a split second. “Performance,” moreover, owed its convoluted plot to some of Borges’s most compelling themes, such as the labyrinth, the double, and the enigma of personal identity, albeit weirdly transposed to a world of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The film, it must be said, was not to everyone’s taste; the critic of the New York Times, for one, attacked its ‘mindless pretension’ and complained that ‘even that great writer, Jorge Luis Borges, is dragged into the cesspool.’”

Mystery unraveled. It’s all Borges. Now I must admit I’m not widely read in Borges. A few of his stories crossed my desk over the years and I read them with pleasure, though I couldn’t cite a single title or theme today. When I read now that he was influenced by Kafka (among many others), I suspect that my extensive reading in Kafka may have given me a sated feeling when I encountered a Kafka-like writer, and so I didn’t venture further into Borges’ writing. At any rate, there’s a new author to read, and I’m ordering some of his works. Living in Miami, I’m more interested in Spanish-language writing than I used to be, so I hope I’m open to Borges now.

First post

I saw "Performance" soon after it came out in 1970. I was near the end of my summer in California, staying then in San Francisco, looking for a job and trying to have as much fun as possible before I turned 30. What a stunning movie. I probably saw it again right away. Then I got a job -- in Philadelphia. Soon I was there and telling my new friends about the amazing movie I'd seen in San Fran. And suddenly it was playing in Philadelphia, and we all got appropriately tuned up and saw it. Maybe again a few times, and then it wasn't playing at all.

We got the soundtrack album and played it until the grooves bled. A few years ago I got the soundtrack on CD, once left it on the voicemail of a friend who had seen it with me in Philadelphia. Otherwise, "Performance" the movie was pretty quiet in the 21st century.

Now it's back. That same friend who heard it on his voicemail, Michael Bein, found the DVD in Best Buy, and I happened to be in Madison last week to visit him and his family. We watched it, and once again were stunned at this most original movie.

And now I see that this blog title is available, and so here's the blog for "Performance" the movie.

Now, let's try to figure out what snippet of Jorge Luis Borges might have inspired it.