‘Performance’: the British movie Martin Scorsese “didn’t understand” but loved anyway

As you can tell, Scorsese is a tremendous fan of the Stones, using their songs at any chance he can get. Naturally, then, he has watched Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s 1970 film Performance, which starred Mick Jagger. The movie is one of many British films that Scorsese loves, although he once claimed that he “never quite understood it”.

Performance follows James Fox’s Chas, a gangster who, in a rage, shoots an old friend and subsequently flees the scene. Looking for somewhere to stay, he pretends to be a performer and manages to blag his way into an apartment where Jagger’s rock star character, Turner, is living with two women, including Anita Pallenberg’s Pherber.

There’s plenty of crime, a topic often explored by Scorsese, although Performance is also defined by its sex and drugs, making it a quintessential British ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’ era movie. For Scorsese, he “didn’t understand any of the drug culture at that time.”

Still, he “liked the picture,” and found inspiration in one of the songs used in the film. The same version of ‘Memo From Turner’, a Stones song that Jagger re-recorded for Performance, is used by Scorsese in Goodfellas. Scorsese explained: “I love the music and I love Jagger in it and James Fox — terrific. That’s one of the reasons I used the Ry Cooder [song] ‘Memo to Turner’.