Sympathy for the Late Sixties

 Two featuring Mick Jagger:

 

PERFORMANCE (1970) (B) - Ah, London in the Swinging Sixties. Donald Cammell, who would go on to direct a few horror films and thrillers, teamed with a young Nicolas Roeg ("Walkabout," "The Man Who Fell to Earth") to tell the trippy tale of a London gangster who goes into hiding at the home of a reclusive and libidinous rock star, played by Mick Jagger.

 

Square-jawed James Fox stars as Chas, who shares a thick Cockney accent with his mob mates, and their rough street life dominates the first third of the film, a sort of grimy homage to classic British noir. But then Chas kills a rival and, losing the faith and protection of his underworld boss, goes on the lam, sweet-talking his way into the home of Turner (Jagger) by posing as a fellow performer. He convinces a woman named Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) to let him crash for a while, and eventually he gets seduced by the hedonism of the household, which includes Turner's three-way relationship with Pherber and another woman.

Pallenberg -- notable for dating Jagger (purportedly) and his Rolling Stones mates Brian Jones and Keith Richards -- is quite of-the-era here, with her casual confidence, blond shag haircut and gravity-defying breasts, as she romps with her freckled friend, Lucy (a boyish Michele Breton). The women are intoxicating, and Jagger has quite a screen presence himself, with those lips and that swagger. Fox is convincing as the normie who ventures into the counter-culture, all the while knowing that there are thugs tracking him down. He will eventually experiment with drugs and gender identity, and make his way into the bed of one of the women.

Turner himself is in a crisis of identity and career, and the filmmakers morph the story into a taut, dark psychological grind. The camera shots are inventive, and the depictions of psychedelic trips manage to avoid coming off as trite. That first third could be a slog, but once the story settles into the claustrophobic confines of the country estate, the cast is engaging, especially whenever Jagger or Pallenberg are present. 

GIMME SHELTER (1970) (A-minus) - From the "Right Place, Right Time" files, in association with "Had to Be There" productions, we give you Exhibit A in support of the case for the final and absolute curdling of the Sixties high in America: this documentary about the December 1969 Rolling Stones concert in San Francisco that unraveled into chaos and a fatal stabbing. 

 

Part concert film and part detective documentary, "Gimme Shelter" is an infamous notch in the belt of the celebrated Maysles brothers (Albert and David) and collaborator Charlotte Zwerin. It curates fly-on-the-wall footage from the Stones' 1969 tour and recordings of iconic tracks at Muscle Schoals in Alabama, before the band arrived in San Francisco for the doomed "festival" at Altamont Speedway, a slapped-together free event that turned into the photo-negative of the peace-and-love gathering at Woodstock four months earlier.

The first half of the film is dominated by standard concert footage at Madison Square Garden in late November (the band was touring behind the album "Let It Bleed"), interspersed with scenes of promoters scrambling in a matter of weeks to cobble together the event that seemed snakebit from the start. (The star of the negotiations is famed celebrity attorney Melvin Belli, working the phones like a big shot.) The Stones are a bit lethargic at MSG (Jagger, of course, excepted). 

Many drugs seem to be involved. The Maysles camera crew (including a young George Lucas of "Star Wars" fame) observes the Stones in the recording studio, mostly watching them listen to playbacks of tracks that would end up on 1971's "Sticky Fingers," such as "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar." The crew also sits by as Jagger and drummer Charlie Watts review footage from Altamont, studying their reactions of an event that could have, at the time, ended the band's career. That is because the security force at Altamont was led by the Hell's Angels -- one of whom boasted that they got paid $500 in beer to protect the stage -- who roughed up the fans (and Marty Balin from Jefferson Airplane) and eventually stabbed to death a man who was reported to have wielded a gun and been hopped up on methamphetamine. The fateful moment is captured by the camera crew and analyzed frame by frame in the documentary.

The fantastic footage -- shot from all angles in and around the stage -- immerses the viewer into the chaos and the repercussions of some profoundly poor decisions by the organizers (which included Michael Lang from Woodstock). It is crazy to watch fans, roadies and Hell's Angels crowd the stage while the opening acts and eventually the Stones try to play music. Things got out of hand from the start (there was little planning for parking or the influx of 300,000 people), and it's no surprise that the Grateful Dead show up and decline to perform. 

Jagger -- ever immortalized by his pleas from the stage of "Why are we fighting?" -- looks shaken by the mayhem surrounding him. He later called the experience "a cathartic end of the era." Thanks to Zwerin and the Maysles brothers, this indispensable artifact chronicles the death of hippie idealism and the myth of Peace and Love.

BONUS TRACKS
From "Performance," the Last Poets with "Wake Up, Niggers":

 

Jagger, demonstrating how music videos would go a decade later, "Memo From Turner" (with Ry Cooder on slide guitar):

 

From "Gimme Shelter," Tina Turner giving an NC-17 performance at Madison Square Garden, opening for the Stones. Jagger blithely comments while reviewing the footage, "It's nice to have a chick occasionally." I'll be in my bunk:

 

The Flying Burrito Brothers, along with the Jefferson Airplane, opened for the Stones at Altamont. Here are the Burritos with the song featured in the film, "Six Days on the Road":

 

Let's give the Stones the last word, with "You Gotta Move" from the 1969 tour: