Mick's Duet

By JAY COCKS

Pop stars continue to have bad luck in films. Musical showcases like Woodstock display them to good musical advantage, but when called upon to act, react or recite a line, they generally perform like stumbling automatons. The Beatles--thanks to the brilliance of Director Richard Lester--managed to escape. But it happened to Elvis, it happened to Sinatra at first, and it is happening now to Mick Jagger, rock's reigning Rolling Stone, who is currently on view in a couple of hapless films.

Performance casts Mick as a freaky rock singer who has given it all up and lives in a cavernous house in Notting Hill with two handmaidens, a little girl, some draperies, a few pastel pillows and a lot of dope. Into this heady atmosphere comes a hood on the lam (James Fox) who rents the downstairs room as a hideout. The hood corrupts the singer, the singer corrupts the hood, and the two handmaidens (Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton) just hang around, giggling a lot and getting into bed and king-sized bathtubs with anyone available. The film, which pretends to have something more or less profound to say about exchanges of identity and loosening of moral fiber, alternates between incomprehensible chichi and flatulent boredom. Donald Cammell, the writer and codirector, edits his film elliptically and achieves a suffocating sense of baroque paranoia, but seemingly endless cliches overcome all the subliminal imagery.

When someone talks about a pyramid, there is a flash cut of an erect nipple; when the hoodlum dyes his hair, there is a cut to the singer spray-painting a wall. James Fox is nevertheless excellent as the gangster, and Jagger seems to be having a lark. Few others will share his pleasure.

Ned Kelly is a Tony Richardson movie about a legendary Australian bandit, a kind of 19th century Robin Hood. In the title role, Mick sticks up banks and shoots a lot of policemen. But he pays for all that fun. As the hangman slips the inevitable noose around his neck, Jagger looks straight into the camera and says: "Such is life."

Jocelyn Herbert's production design creates a feeling of violent, boisterous squalor, and Gerry Fisher's camera work --like Nicolas Roeg's in Performance --is discreet but evocative. Of course, Mick gets to sing in both films. In Performance, he delivers a zesty composition of his own, called Memo from Turner, and in Ned Kelly, he gives us approximately 847 choruses of The Wild Colonial Boy. Jagger's best film role to date is still in Godard's One Plus One, where he can be seen doing what he does best: just singing.

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