Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment

Morgan is a painter from a working-class communist family with his head full of gorillas and Marx. His wife Leonie wants a divorce and is preparing to marry someone else. Morgan will not accept it. He gets into the house in secret, interferes with things, frightens her fiancé and finds himself behaving like an ape. As the distance between him and reality grows, imagined scenes push into the film, and it ends in a mental hospital. Karel Reisz's film is an example of how class, madness and revolt were put in the same container in British cinema of the sixties. Morgan's behaviour is played for comedy, but the film does not raise him up as a free spirit either; the harm he does to the woman is plainly visible. It is David Warner's first major part. Vanessa Redgrave won the best actress award at Cannes in 1966 for it and was nominated for an Academy Award. The source is David Mercer's television play.