Joe Davian delivers a very poor porn film in COMMAND PERFORMANCE, yet manages to include in the live action some remarkably good (for what it is - a porn player making music) folk guitar and singing by star David Pierce. It adds up to a mish-mash only a searcher for pearls in unlikely places (like myself) could enjoy.
I invoke the Coens because their fairly recent INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS was the pair's shaggy-dog emptiness at its worst. Davian was not a pretentious filmmaker like these critical darlings, and his honest, if misguided, inclusion of lots of folk music performance by Pierce is far superior to the drek delivered by Oscar Isaac, now adding him to the roster of currently irritating leading men thanks to that "breakthrough" assignment.
Pierce plays Clem, auditioning for a part in a Broadway play whose producer R. Bolla describes as being in the vein of "Let My People Come", an off-Broadway hit of the time notorious as being in the wake of other sex-oriented musicals like Oh! Calcutta!.
While Pierce opens the movie with a well-performed (direct-sound) folk ballad, we witness a montage of Times Square marquees at night, split between plays and 42nd St. movies, giving COMMAND a snapshot time capsule aspect. It's impressive what was happening back in '76/'77, as we see: "For Colored Girls...", "Grease", "A Party with Betty Comden/Adolph Green", "Chicago", "Oh! Calcutta!", "My Fair Lady", Helen Madigan & Starry Night live in a burlesk show, "Pippin", "A Chorus Line" and "The Wiz", plus movies including GATOR, CARRIE, HUMAN TORNADO, FRENCH SHAMPOO, LADY ON A COUCH, THE MUTHERS, ROCKY, BURNT OFFERINGS, VILLA RIDES and TEMPTATIONS.
With improvised dialogue, film consists of several auditions plus extraneous humping scenes. Smoking a pipe, Bolla is less hammy than usual, merely savoring the power, shared with his co-producer, of selecting folk for his upcoming show. He ends up hiring everybody, a rather wishful and fanciful excuse for a happy ending by Davian.
Mood is quite different from the usual Davian BDSM lite, except that one of the acts has Mark Le Beau abusing Susan Le Beau, leaving plenty of marks -shot live, no effects - on her posterior as he whips her, with the usual gimmick of the sub counting down the lashes as if working on a remake of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. He even puts her in stocks like ancient Salem punishments, but her blow job in such circumstances leaves a lot to be desired.
Bolla's pair of cuties, Victoria Corsaut and Susaye London are great eye candy, but this hour-long porn filler has no story or structure to support it. Might as well have been a Major Bowes amateur hour with XXX content, for which we have to suffer through endless imitations on TV nowadays beginning with "American Idol".
David Pierce, a fixture in many a Davian stinker, shows some real talent here - talent that apparently never got discovered the way Oscar Isaac did. If one throws away pigeonholing and stereotyping of porn for the sake of argument, and watches his performance as just another struggling show biz aspirant, one might come to the same conclusion I did regarding the relative merits of his work here vs. the studied, dead-on-arrival Isaac/Coens' similar imitation of real folk music.
