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.
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