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

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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. Next came my father’s first and probably best-known feature film: Saturday Night and Saturday Morning (1960), based on Alan Sillitoe’s bestselling novel, and starring a young Albert Finney as a factory worker in Nottingham. He sets out his philosophy of life at his lathe: “What I’m out for is a good time. All the rest is propaganda … Don’t let the bastards grind you down!”

Twenty years ago on Friday my father, the film-maker Karel Reisz, died at the age of 76. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson, he was a leading figure of the British new wave. Unlike Anderson, who cultivated an outspokenly cantankerous persona, he disliked being interviewed about his work and was never really a public figure. Yet, rather like Ken Loach today, his films were widely admired for compassionately exploring the parts of British society that most earlier directors had ignored. At a time of economic turmoil and intense disillusion with politics, they remain urgently relevant. 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] David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966). Photograph: British Lion Film Corporation/Allstar

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

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. 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 The grittiness of inner urban life has been replaced by the luxuries of upper-middle-class London.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. 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.” The film vividly captures the particular moment when postwar austerity was being replaced by optimism and incipient consumerism. Finney’s character is contemptuous of his fellow workers who “got ground down before the war and never got over it”. Instead, he splashes out on good clothes, takes part in a drinking contest, falls down the stairs, shoots a nosy neighbour with an air gun and has an affair with the wife of a co-worker. Formally, Morgan marks the moment when British social realism moved into a surrealistic depiction of inner psychological states. Karel Reisz had already made his name as a founder member of the Free Cinema documentary movement: 1959's We Are the Lambeth Boys was a groundbreaking look at young working-class life, while 1960's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning showed naturalism could be big box office.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. 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.

Like Mercer himself, Morgan has made it. But the gulf between his hardcore Stalinist upbringing and the new, apparently classless metropolitan consumer culture is beginning to tear him apart. And so a comedy of manners begins to tip into something darker. Morgan appears to be a bumbling fool, but he is also the fool in an older, deeper sense: the jester who strips away the veils of illusion to reveal an unpalatable truth. This scene was not in the first version of this story, which was broadcast as a TV play by the BBC in October 1962, with Ian Hendry in the lead role. The story was written by David Mercer, who had himself experienced severe depression. By the time Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment – directed by Karel Reisz and starring David Warner as Morgan – was released in April 1966, some plot and dialogue remained the same, but the mood was much sharper and harder.

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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.” 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.

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.’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.”