Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment

Time does odd things to some films. In 1966, Morgan--A Suitable Case for Treatment was hailed as a touching black comedy about the destruction of a free spirit by an uncaring bourgeois world. Playwright David Mercer's screenplay is full of his standard obsessions of the time--Trotskyism and RD Laing's perception of the mad as truly sane--and Karel Reisz's direction effectively balances Morgan's failing real-world life with a fantasy life of gorillas, King Kong and sinister partisans emerging from a crisply photographed Battersea Power Station. David Warner's Morgan is far more like his student rebel Hamlet of the same year than the B-Movie villains for which he has been more famous for ever since; it is a sentimentalised performance, but only because of the deep sentimentality of the film. A cast that includes Robert Stephens, Irene Handl and Bernard Bresslaw give us some effective social satire and low comedy. The trouble is that Morgan's pursuit and near-rape of his ex-wife, and his trashing of her society wedding, now look more like the behaviour of a stalker than an act of bohemian rebellion; it is significant that the film treats Vanessa Redgrave as a treacherous bimbo with nothing much to do except smile wistfully. Morgan may have been one of the trendiest films of its Swinging London epoch but it has not aged well.No subtitles