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

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The film stars David Warner, Vanessa Redgrave, and Robert Stephens, with Irene Handl and Bernard Bresslaw.

Morgan Delt, artist, fantasist and socialist, embarks on a series of wild escapades designed to prevent his ex-wife's impending marriage. Show full synopsis David Warner plays Morgan with a bewildered expression that succeeds in making Morgan an oddball character. He is completely sound of mind within in his own head and often makes the people he interacts with question their sanity. At moments he is so unpredictable that he verges on being slightly psychopathic. Warner really keeps all the elements of Morgan within control.

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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.

Newspapers, as the voiceover says, often dismissed the youth of the time as “the rowdy generation”. The film asks us to look again, to celebrate their resilience and vitality, to cut through the negative stereotypes and realise what we all have in common. It still feels like an eloquent reproof to polarisation and the kind of attitudes typified by the young Rishi Sunak when he – now notoriously – said, aged 18: “I have friends who are aristocrats. I have friends who are upper class. I have friends who are working-class … well, not working class.” Morgan’s marriage is breaking up and he is still haunted by the rigid dogmas of his communist childhood. His mother now considers him “a bleeding liberal”, if not a class traitor. At Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery, she tells him: “Your dad wanted to shoot the royal family, abolish marriage and put everybody who’d been to public school in a chain gang. Yes, he was an idealist your dad was.” Morgan, unsurprisingly, tells the story of a man called Morgan played by David Warner. He is a strange, aggressive and rather odd man who often escapes reality by falling into a dream world, often looking at people or situations and imagining an animal there instead, as his ex-wife proclaims; ‘he’s always liked animals’. Vanessa Redgrave plays his ex-wife in her first film role and the film is based very much around the relationship of these two people. Stephen Frears, who went on to become a director himself after working as my father’s assistant, saw the film on its release in 1960. “It had a huge influence on me,” he says. “The cinema at the time was where you learned how to live. It was a wonderful time in Britain, and particularly if you were from the Midlands or the north. You’d never been treated in this way before, in films that truthfully showed what life was like. The world just became a more interesting place because of them.”

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. 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. He was Henry VI in the RSC’s celebrated War of the Roses trilogy, which was adapted by John Barton from the three Henry plays and Richard III, and directed by Barton and Hall. A dynamic BBC film of the plays, ambitiously shot with 12 cameras, reached a wide audience during its two broadcasts in 1965 and 1966. Warner was then surprised by Hall’s invitation to play Hamlet. “I’m really a character actor, an old man actor,” he said, though he was only 24 at the time. 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.