When Donald Cammell shot himself at his home in the Hollywood hills on the evening of April 23, 1996, he had already been talking about reclaiming his last complete feature from the video company who had mangled it. Some four years later that hope has become a reality with the release of Donald Cammell’s Wild Side, a restored director’s cut of this freewheeling, blackly comic psycho-sexual thriller, painstakingly pieced together by editor Frank Mazzola in the very same cutting room where he and Cammell had assembled Performance some three decades before.

This Edinburgh-born scion of the Cammell-Laird shipbuilding dynasty was undoubtedly a maverick talent, first as a painter, then screenwriter and director. Yet aside from the hallucinatory, still exhilarating power of Performance, it’s debatable whether he fulfilled his potential; his uncompromising sensibility just wasn’t the way to impress the suits who run the film business. Certainly, his screenplay for Wild Side proceeds from the notion that money means power and power means sex. In one of his most extreme performances, Christopher Walken plays a fabulously wealthy money launderer besotted with Anne Heche, a banker who’s working as a prostitute to secure the cash that will keep her California beachfront home off the market. His dollars buy her sexual services, but it can’t stop her falling for his wife (played by Joan Chen), whom he also uses as part of his ongoing financial scams.

The two women’s lyrical and latterly erotic relationship provides a backbone of keening romanticism, while Cammell’s mischief-making and Walken’s grandstanding take sleazo-thriller conventions on a wild goose chase. Wild Side may not be a final masterpiece to cap Cammell’s years of struggle against Tinseltown Philistines, but it does have a disarming devil-may-care insouciance which could well spell late-night cult potential.

U.S.A., 1999.
Colour.
Dolby stereo.
112 min.