Quote:
Originally Posted by willo007
and I was just going to ask if this was any good. Any other opinions out there?
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I wasn't overenthused by the film but the documentary on Arrow's disc was worth the price on its own:
Despite being the creative force behind Performance, it’s all too easy to see why the co-director Donald Cammell had to appoint after completely alienating the crew, Nicolas Roeg, went on to greater glories while he never even developed much of a cult reputation despite ticking all the requisite boxes (a skewed worldview, constant fights with producers and distributors, a handful of barely distributed box-office flops that impressed the odd critic): his films are full of half developed ideas and shifts in tone that often mistake chaos, onscreen and off, for creativity. Case in point White of the Eye, a serial killer drama - it’s too devoid of tension and unsettling mood to be called a thriller - that sounds much more interesting on paper than it does on screen. Not that it doesn’t have the odd section that creates a mood all its own, but it’s strangely uncompelling before an increasingly silly last act throws in not one but two psychos for a finale that just leaves you admiring the actors for playing it so straight as the writer-director throws credibility completely out the window after spending so much time creating a convincing rural blue collar milieu.
At its heart are two fine performances from David Keith and Cathy Moriarty, and they do more to keep the film on track that Cammell does. Keith’s small town audio engineer and decent family man finds himself on the suspects list in a series of murders of wealthy women because he’s one of 42 people in that state to have bought a certain kind of tyre. No-one really seems to believe he’s done it and even his wife (Moriarty) is more concerned that he’s been cheating with one of his customers, the film focussing on their frayed but passionate relationship while the investigation by Art Evans’ Mahler and Piccasso-loving cop occasionally intrudes, jostling for scraps of screen time with bleach bypassed flashbacks of Moriarty’s earlier relationship with Alan Rosenberg (the only other potential suspect the film offers the audience) that brought her and Keith together. When the various strands finally collide in the last third, Cammell doesn’t really know how to resolve them: there are attempts to juxtapose mundane domesticity with horrendous crimes, the makeup design tries to combine the earlier hints of Native American mythology in the way the victims’ body parts were arranged with Kabuki Theatre, some standard slasher in the house plot mechanics and the where-did-he-come-from reappearance of one character that you suspect had the few people in the audience laughing in all the wrong places.
The result, like Cammell’s other films (Demon Seed, Wild Side) feels like a half-remembered song must have been running around inside his head but constantly turning into a different one before he could quite put his finger on it. It’s the kind of off-kilter unresolved approach to ideas that some find genius but the majority just find undisciplined and unsatisfying: it’s simply a matter of personal taste which conclusion you’ll reach. Mark me down as one of the latter.
Arrow’s Blu-ray/DVD combo has an acceptable transfer that’s not without some problems in the darker scenes, though nothing as excessive as some of their earlier Argento releases before they got a bit more serious about quality control. It’s in the extras package that it excels - audio commentary by Sam Umland, who also comments on two deleted sounds for which the soundtrack is missing, the flashback scenes offered without the bleach bypass effect, an interview with one of the film’s two cinematographers, Larry McConkey, that attests to Cammell’s passive aggressive love of creating conflict (true to form Cammell told neither cinematographer that he’d hired the other), a rather tiresome short film by Cammell, The Argument, alternate main title sequence, booklet and, best of all, the BBC’s 73-minute documentary Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance which is far more intriguing than anything in the main feature and worth the price of the disc on its own.
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White of the Eye (1987) - Scream Factory
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