Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment [Blu-ray]

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Again he was Heydrich in the television movie Hitler’s SS: Portrait in Evil (1985). He starred in the second series of David Lynch’s cult crime series Twin Peaks (1991) and as different characters in two Star Trek films, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). In the latter he delivered the immortal line: “You’ve not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Released in April 1966 – the month Time magazine's Swinging London issue was published – Morgan is both of its time and points forward to the darker popular culture that would ensue later that year and into 1968, the year of international youth revolution. Indeed, its popularity among the young may well have facilitated this radicalisation, certainly within Britain. The film's depiction of madness is deliberately ambivalent. The inner logic of Morgan's statements and his sure self-knowledge, as well as his rejection of the consumer society's superficial trappings, mark him as the only sane character. His madness, therefore, is like the state celebrated by RD Laing: insanity not as a state worthy of condign treatment but as a rebellion, the only possible act of sanity in a mad, mad world.

The play explores a familiar Mercer theme, what filmmaker Paul Madden called "social alienation masquerading as madness". It was innovative in the way it represented Morgan's thoughts and fantasies, his speech patterns and eccentric behaviour.My father’s final big success was 1981’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, adapted by Harold Pinter from the John Fowles novel. As with the book, which has three alternative endings, it is a romantic Victorian melodrama and a deconstruction of the genre, with stars Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons playing contemporary actors as well as their period characters. Bragg says the audacity of the decision by my father and Pinter to use the device of a film-within-a-film was typical of his ambition, and “flair for getting to the heart of the books and stories he chose”. Half a decade and a youth revolution later, Morgan has been living the dream. The grittiness of inner urban life has been replaced by the luxuries of upper-middle-class London. Leonie's flat is full of consumer goodies, while Morgan himself is recast from the original as a painter rather than a writer: his nemesis Charles Napier has a fashionable West End gallery full of mobiles and action sculptures. So does capitalism reinvent itself. The leading actors were as fashionable as the décor, at least for British audiences. David Warner had just played a Hamlet at Stratford with which the politically-conscious university students of the mid-1960s could identify. Vanessa Redgrave, from a famous theatrical dynasty, was making a name in films after nearly a decade of classical stage roles. Robert Stephens was the current attraction in the newly-established National Theatre at the Old Vic. Morgan is already there. His dreams are becoming nightmares. As he admits: "Nothing in this world seems to live up to my best fantasies." After disrupting Charles and Leonie's wedding – dressed up in a gorilla suit, spurred on by intercut clips from the 1933 version of King Kong – Morgan speeds off on a purloined motorbike, his suit smouldering, along a Park Lane still in the throes of redevelopment, in a wonderful shot. These ideas of Laing’s set in store a whole ideological wave among counter-culture ‘rebels’ in search of individualism, essentialism and anti-bourgeois life choices in the 60s. The generation who had just missed the ‘angry young men’ were now in thrall to the ‘it’s-ok-to-be-crazy in this insane world which our parents made’ attitude - a disposition that many misfit 60s characters displayed. The cultural battle cry was for authenticity of experience.

The film was also nominated for the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival and Redgrave was awarded Best Actress. [4] One of the British cinema's more memorable images in the 1960s was that of a man, dressed in a smouldering gorilla suit, speeding away from the camera on a motorbike. He was sanguine about the parts that came his way, insisting that “one cannot live on Vanyas alone” and calling himself a “letterbox actor” – “If the script comes through the letterbox, I’ll do it.”

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Morgan was superficially a “swinging London” movie – made by a man who was, to the best of my knowledge, not heavily involved in the hedonism of the time: his main hobbies were gardening, collecting art and playing bridge. Yet he and writer David Mercer tapped into the fierce debates, associated with the radical psychiatrist RD Laing, about whether insanity can sometimes be a “rational” response to a mad world. The film Morgan, like its central character, defies easy explanation.At least, that’s the impression that the movie apparently wants to make.In actuality, the film’s namesake is not nearly so difficult to pin down:he’s terrible. Morgan comes at an interesting intersection of filmic cycles in British cinema; cycles in which Czech-born director Karel Reisz had immersed himself. Reisz was, along with Lindsey Anderson and Tony Richardson, a veteran of the short-lived Free Cinema movement, which sought to bring a more poetic realism and a nouvelle vague-ish tone to socially concerned British commercial cinema. The Free Cinema movement had emphasised the marginal, the communal and the youthful in its documentary mode of filmmaking in films such as We Are the Lambeth Boys, Mama Don’t Allow, O Dreamland and Every Day Except Christmas. Free Cinema was itself much influenced by the Griersonian mode of documentary filmmaking as well as the British ‘social problem’ films, which had developed in the 1930s with works such as The Citadel and There Ain’t No Justice and carried on after the war with Cosh Boy, The Lost People or Good Time Girl.

The opening scene features the hero – David Warner’s unravelling artist – admiring Guy, the gorilla at London zoo. My brothers and I were taken behind the scenes and got a chance to meet the orangutans – miles more thrilling than any of our brief encounters with movie stars. It's the cultural, social and political difference between 1962 and 1966. Whereas the earlier version remains within genre bounds, Morgan trashes them freely. The tone is all over the place: is it a marital farce, a swinging London romp, or a deeply subversive assault on the British class system and, indeed, all the values that society holds dear?By today’s standards, Morganis indeed a suitable case for treatment, insomuch as the character’s own gross behaviors and proclamations. Look at him lost in his own head, that Morgan!But, it’s important to remember (and in fact virtually impossible to forget, what with its incessant gorilla-suit fascination and casual Cold War iconography) that this is very much a film of its time and needs to be approached as such.But, all in all, the protagonist’s behaviors should’ve been no less excusable then as they are now.Morgan, even without his diagnosis, isobviously a terrible guy, even as Morganis not an altogether terrible, or even uninteresting movie.Basically avoidable, yes, but not terrible. Morgan’s fractured personality soon regresses and becomes fixated on a new alter ego - that of a gorilla. He dons an ape costume and enacts the creature’s sounds and movements, which helps him to function in what he has come to believe is a more authentic, less complicated, primitivist mode of existence. It is a coping mechanism by which he can navigate and manage the ‘mad’ world of bourgeois respectability and repressive behaviours. He feels that only his mother, an unreconstructed Stalinist, has any genuine values, but she feels that Morgan is a sell-out. She refuses to ‘de-Stalinise’ and reminds Morgan: ‘Your dad wanted to shoot the royal family, abolish marriage and put everybody who’d been to a public school in a chain gang. He was an idealist, was your dad.’