Stars: Vanessa Redgrave, David Warner, Robert Stephens, Irene Handl, Bernard Bresslaw

Director: Karel Reisz

Summary: After his wife leaves him, a young artist seeks to assuage his bruised feelings by acting out his fantasies in a strange manner. He finds life more bearable when disguised as a gorilla...

In Karel Reisz's MORGAN: A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT, the wildly eccentric artist, Morgan, played with lunatic delight by David Warner, is driven over the edge when his ex-wife, Leonie (Vanessa Redgrave), with whom he is still smitten, announces that she plans to remarry. The focus of the film is tilted toward the comedic aspects of Morgan's exploits, (King Kong is his role model), as he desperately tries to win Leonie back from her posh--and sane--fiance Charles Napier (Robert Stephens). Morgan begins by living in his ex-wife's car outside her apartment, and things only get stranger from there.
Enter Vanessa Redgrave, in her first major screen appearance, possessing the most wickedly innocent look imaginable. Although she firmly tells Morgan that their relationship is over, because she wants a normal life with Napier, she still engages in passionate sex with him. The other woman in Morgan's life is his mother (Irene Handl), a Trotskyite who sincerely believes that Morgan should be taking over the country. But even she can see that he has serious mental problems. MORGAN is, overall, a likable comedy about the artist representing the id in all of us. Who among us hasn't wanted to put on a gorilla suit and run amok

WIN DVDs by rating this DVD

Average User Rating:

WIN DVDS by being amongst the first to review this DVD. Reviewing DVDs earns you bonus entries and lets you WIN DVDs!Please login before reviewing this DVD. If you're a new user, register for free and enter to WIN FREE DVDs!

Time does odd things to some films. In 1966, Morgan--A Suitable Case for Treatmentwas 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. Morganmay have been one of the trendiest films of its Swinging London epoch but it has not aged well.

On the DVD:the DVD is presented with Dolby Digital sound that makes the most of John Danworth's jazz score in a 2:1 full frame visual aspect. The clean print makes the most of the mono photography. --Roz Kaveney

Aspect Ratio:	Full Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Scene Selection
Year:	1966
Release Date:	September 24, 2001
Runtime:	93 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	M P 089 D
Label:	Vintage Collection
Keywords:	Morgan, Case, Comedy, General, Treatment, Suitable
Genre:	Comedy