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

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My father’s final big success was 1981’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, adapted by Harold Pinter from the John Fowles novel. As with the book, which has three alternative endings, it is a romantic Victorian melodrama and a deconstruction of the genre, with stars Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons playing contemporary actors as well as their period characters. Bragg says the audacity of the decision by my father and Pinter to use the device of a film-within-a-film was typical of his ambition, and “flair for getting to the heart of the books and stories he chose”. 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] 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.” 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 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.

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.”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.” The play explores a familiar Mercer theme, what filmmaker Paul Madden called "social alienation masquerading as madness". It was innovative in the way it represented Morgan's thoughts and fantasies, his speech patterns and eccentric behaviour.

Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment (also called Morgan!) is a 1966 comedy film made by British Lion. It was directed by Karel Reisz and produced by Leon Clore from a screenplay by David Mercer. He adapted it from his BBC television play A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962), in which the leading role was played by Ian Hendry. [3] While the film was being shot, those within the new, chimerical, classless culture began to hit the wall. In the winter of 1965/66, Ray Davies satirised swinging London in songs such as Where Have All the Good Times Gone? and Dedicated Follower of Fashion. Overwhelmed by global superstardom, Davies had a collapse in February 1966: as he wrote soon afterwards in Too Much On My Mind: "My poor demented mind is slowly going." It was also in February 1966 that the Rolling Stones released their depiction of disturbance, 19th Nervous Breakdown. In tandem with the effects of psychedelic drugs and the acceleration of media culture, during 1966 bizarre psychological states became a pop property with records both serious – Love's Seven and Seven Is, the Move's Disturbance – and ludicrous, such as Napoleon XIV's They're Coming to Take Me Away. But then, this being merry ol’ England in the swingin’ sixties, perhaps there was more latitude for things like incessant unwanted stalking, threatened rape of a former spouse, and utter defiance of the law even when convicted. Oh, that Morgan! What a kooky cad he is!And his diagnosed mental instability only adds to his charm!Bless this deranged fool all the way to Cambridge, he simply will notleave his ex-wife alone!Released in April 1966 – the month Time magazine's Swinging London issue was published – Morgan is both of its time and points forward to the darker popular culture that would ensue later that year and into 1968, the year of international youth revolution. Indeed, its popularity among the young may well have facilitated this radicalisation, certainly within Britain. The film's depiction of madness is deliberately ambivalent. The inner logic of Morgan's statements and his sure self-knowledge, as well as his rejection of the consumer society's superficial trappings, mark him as the only sane character. His madness, therefore, is like the state celebrated by RD Laing: insanity not as a state worthy of condign treatment but as a rebellion, the only possible act of sanity in a mad, mad world. Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, or to give it the shortened American release title, Morgan! is an adaptation of an original 1962 television play by Wakefield-born Marxist writer and painter David Mercer entitled A Suitable Case for Treatment (starring Ian Hendry as Morgan and Keith Barron). Morgan is a script steeped in Marx and more importantly, the theories of R.D. Laing, whose claims included that the roots of schizophrenia were to be found in the family, and by extension, in society. He developed ideas of anti-psychiatry and claimed, for example, that ‘madness’ could be seen as a sane response to an insane world and argued such positions as: ‘Who poses the greater threat to society: the fighter pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima or the schizophrenic who believes the bomb is inside his own body?’ 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. A film poster for Morgan is prominently shown in the 2016 film High-Rise (adapted from the novel of the same name by J. G. Ballard).