Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966)

To me, this movie is perfection.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

In many ways this film is remarkable. The story is a classic love/convenience triangle. And helplessly jealous Morgan is cut out to be the big loser from the start. A working class hopeful and a painter, he is just not willing to become an adult and prefers to descend into lunacy instead. His attempts to win back his upper class ex wife, an insecure character herself, are childish and quixotic in nature and enlighten the basically sad story with slapstick moments. The acting is mostly very good. David Warner is sweet and unforgettable – why he was chosen to play so many villains later in his career remains a mystery to me. Vanessa Redgrave's Oscar nomination was well deserved. Irene Handl as Morgan's mother is also very good. She represents the family background with its Marxist tradition. Apparently her generation hoped that lads like Morgan would become the enlightened new leaders of their movement! Instead, her son is a good for nothing character, for him the emblems of communism are just a decor to shock the petty bourgeois. At the time this movie was made, it became chic again to be orientated toward the left. In China Mao started the Cultural Revolution, being a Red meant (in the West, at least) being unconventional, hip and somehow liberated. This romantic, pubertal New Left lasted more ore less until the genocide in Cambodia, then their supporters integrated themselves into the existing system or indulged in esoteric activities (or both). To me Morgan somehow represents the New Left which then emerged.

What some men will go through in order to win their ex- wife back forms the basis for this 1966 film farce.David Warner gives quite a display as the rejected husband who shall resort to just about anything to get his recently divorced wife, Vanessa Redgrave, in a totally ridiculous Oscar nominated performance by her, to get her to return to him.Warner goes completely berserk in the film,wire tapping and doing all sorts of mayhem.Redgrave comes from a rich family and how she ever had married the Warner character, a pure bred Communist, is beyond me. Irene Handl as his mother is effective in attempting to understand his off- the-wall behavior.The picture just goes from one crazy routine to another and the emulation of King Cong by its end is most ridiculous at best. The ending at the asylum with the hammer and sickle, symbols of Communism is most appropriate. It's just that someone should have taken a hammer and sickle to the entire movie.

Bravo David Warner for his exuberant and unrestrained performance. He is desperate, driven, selfish, sensitive all at once. His affinity with animals symbolizes his continual acting on instinct. Bravo too to Vanessa Redgrave who believably shows that whackiness can co-exist with poshness.Sadly, the movie makes Morgan an earnest communist, and this has the effect of dating the film terribly. I strove hard to see the communism not as literal but as symbolic of Morgan's "rebel" nature, but doing this was an uphill climb. Within just a few years after this film was made, it became clear that communism could never mix with the gleeful artistic spirit that Morgan embodies, that in real life communism was soul-deadening and drab.But a movie need not be wholly believable or wholly good. Warner's performance alone makes this film a ride worth taking.

Say "1960's British comedy movie" and already some people are thinking of impossibly mod dialogue, dated images and an obsession with pop and quick sex. This movie shouldn't work but it does. Try pitching a concept of an insane young communist obsessed with gorillas and unable to come to terms with the break up of his marriage to today's Hollywood executives and you'd get thrown out of their offices. But it is genuinely funny and sad, it's well directed and you can't speak highly enough of David Warner in the lead role.I've always thought that Warner is at his best when his seemingly unsympathetic characters engender some sympathy. The retarded man in "Straw Dogs", the jaded Captain in "Cross of Iron", the put apon conscript in "The Bofors Gun" to name but a few. Morgan is his ultimate portrayal of this type of character.