Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

 

Performance (Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)

Cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michèle Breton, Johnny Shannon, Anthony Valentine, Ann Sidney, John Bindon, Stanley Meadows, Allan Cuthbertson, Anthony Morton. Screenplay: Donald Cammell. Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg. Art direction: John Clark. Film editing: Anthony Gibbs, John Smedley-Aston. Music: Jack Nitzsche. 

I’m so used to seeing James Fox as a proper upperclass Brit in films like A Passage to India (David Lean, 1984) and The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993) that it took me a while to identify him with the kinky gangster Chas he plays in Performance. In fact, it’s a role that writer and co-director Donald Cammell intended for Marlon Brando. But Fox, with his veneer of handsome self-assuredness, fits the film perfectly as the foil for MIck Jagger’s sybaritic rock star, Turner. It’s a film about outlaws from two worlds, the criminal Chas and the artist Turner coming together on the artist’s turf. It’s also a kind of Götterdämmerung for the swinging ‘60s, made during the ‘60s but held from release until the selfish ‘70s by a squeamish studio, its sex and nudity edited out but restored, at least partially, later. It’s visually and narratively challenging, with time- and place-switching editing to the point that it still provokes exegesis. It launched co-director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg’s career, and it may have doomed Cammell’s. In short, it’s some kind of important film, but no one has ever been able to pin down exactly why. The very definition of a cult film.

Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977)

Demon Seed (Donald Cammell, 1977)

Cast: Julie Christie, Fritz Weaver, Gerrit Graham, Barry Kroeger, Lisa Lu, Larry J. Blake, John O'Leary, Alfred Dennis, Davis Roberts, Patricia Wilson, Dana Laurita. Screenplay: Robert Jaffe, Roger O. Hirson, based on a novel by Dean R. Koontz. Cinematography: Bill Butler. Production design: Edward C. Carfagno. Film editing: Frank Mazzola. Music: Jerry Fielding.

I'm still more afraid of insufficient human intelligence than of artificial computer intelligence, but I appreciate the prophetic quality of Demon Seed, a film that finds itself resurfacing today amid our uneasiness about social media and the invasion of privacy. Whenever I address my Echo Dot as "Alexa," I will be reminded of Julie Christie's Susan trying out voice commands on her wired house, which has turned from a servant into a jailer and rapist. The movie, unfortunately, looks a little cheesy today -- the cinematography is occasionally murky and the set-ups cluttered -- and it lacks a leavening sense of humor, which often makes horror sci-fi more fun and frightening. I question the waste of an actor of Julie Christie's caliber in a role that's mostly a passive woman-in-jeopardy cliché. And for that matter, why is the only woman scientist in the film Chinese? Are we stuck in the "sinister Oriental" mode here? There's a lot of muddle and loose ends in the plotting: What's the point, for example, of Susan's work as a therapist for a young girl, other than to use the kid as a bit of leverage that Proteus can wield in his torture of Susan? And why do we learn so late in the film that Susan and Alex lost a child, who died of leukemia, some time after we are told that one of Proteus's first achievements was a cure for leukemia? Still, Demon Seed holds its place as an unsettling view of the future that has become our present.