Hey, hey it’s the monkey… Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966)

At the time people used to say that David Warner’s Hamlet was the best of his generation and yet no one ever mentions his superlative performance as a guerrilla in Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966). This is another one I would have seen with the family in our seventies sitting room: and probably one that took a little explaining from my patient parents.

Morgan follows a familiar theme for films of this period; mental illness versus idiot savant; the natural outsider who won’t give up his wonder at the World and nature just for the benefit of being accepted – just a little – in polite society. Morgan is a bit of a child and his love and natural affinity with wife Leonie (Vanessa Redgrave) is not enough for her to want to end their marriage and go off with their art-dealer pal Charles Napier (Robert Stephens). Leonie still loves Morgan and, indeed, they keep slipping and making love…. But she has had enough of his unpredictability and his unwillingness to grow up. Morgan is a talented artist but he’s never focused on success; just expression.

Vanessa and friend

All this is frustrating for Leonie’s mother, Mrs Henderson (Nan Munro) who cannot abide the man she views as having wasted her daughter’s time, in comparison, Morgan’s mother (Irene Handl) is on top of the situation. Mrs Delt is a firm believer in fate as well as the Marxist Dialectic and frequently quotes from Das Kapital with analysis that is still more than pertinent today, comrades. She also quotes Morgan’s birth father, who was a party member and committed to social and political change. There’s a lovely sequence when she and Morgan go to lay flowers on Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate, and Morgan gives her a piggy-back - there's a lot of love in the film.

Based on David Mercer’s BBC television play A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962), starring Ian Hendry, this Morgan has a more whimsical approach and is a very swinging take on the writer’s examination of social alienation and mental health. Morgan Delt was not meant to fit in or rather he refuses to; we see the world often through his eyes and he is easily distracted. He has a voracious appetite for natural history and often sees people in terms of the animals they represent: a group of builders on scaffold are monkeys, lawyers are giraffes, he and his wife are Zebras and an attractive woman on the tube makes him feel like a peacock.

David Warner and Irene Handl

It’s very Reggie Perrin (or rather the other way around) and his fantasy associations also encompass the movies with excerpts from a Johnny Weismuller Tarzan film – “he Tarzan, Leonie Jane” – and then King Kong when, dressed in a guerrilla costume, he climbs up to invade Leonie and Charles’ wedding reception. The films inspire and legitimise his seemingly futile attempts to reclaim his love.

The reaction to Morgan’s extremes – he refuses to leave after being divorced and lives in his wife’s car outside even though he can’t drive are not quite as you’d expect: people are mostly kind. The local bobby (Bernard Bresslaw) is more than lenient, whilst even Charles has an affection for Morgan, not just because of his talent as a painter but he understands that he’s not as threatening as he wishes he was – he calmly diffuses Morgan’s entry into his gallery armed with a revolver. Leonie understands her husband/ex-husband but here she wants a more socially-acceptable future, although there’s enough ambiguity to make us wonder.

Leonie's almost as much of a free spirit as Morgan... almost.

There are some lovely scenes of Morgan in his bed on the railway lines leading to the still functioning Battersea Power Station (now, sadly, a backdrop to some dull and very expensive apartment blocks) as Cossacks on horseback, led by Leonie, chase him down, in a later scene she is one of a group of revolutionaries shooting him dead. There’s constant referencing of Marxism but the film doesn’t really define Morgan’s attachment to the cause, even his mother calls him a class traitor. Perhaps, like everything else, it’s a fantasy for him… another socially-deviant obsession that in the words of his psychiatrist, make him a suitable case for treatment.

Dusty Verdict: Directed well by Karel Reisz, Morgan is period-psych but endures due to the rapport between Redgrave and Warner, they’re a very watchable combination and they riff very effectively off each other’s nuanced improvisations. Stephens is, of course not to be outdone although his role doesn’t allow the same freedom. The whole cast is superb though including Arthur Mullard as Wally, Mrs Delt’s boyfriend – a jobbing wrestler, nicknamed The Gorilla.

Visiting Karl

Morgan’s available on DVD and would make for a great addition to the BFI Flipside series… there’s a lot going on and it would be good to learn mote of the background and politics of the original play, which, along with so much from the 60s BBC is missing, presumed wiped.

The movement you need is on your shoulder… Little Malcolm (1974)

This play originated in the mid-sixties when writer David Halliwell wrote a play about an art-school reject/drop-out much like himself… well, perhaps not entirely like himself. Beatle George liked it then and he liked it again when it became the first film he financed and produced in 1974.

It addresses contemporary concerns about authentic motivation, truth, honesty, gender and power and whilst it has the fags and unkempt hair of its period these are hardly issues that have gone away; certainly not in the era of extremism from ISIS to BNP and in which the allure of charismatic leaders with simple, powerful ideas has hardly diminished…

“It’s no good theorising about getting up, it’s the act that counts”

John Hurt

It starts out with the humorous malaise of the disappointed art student and escalates horribly out of control as single tone binary extremism leads to sickening violence. Every further educational establishment in Britain is worried about such dangerous drifts from disaffection – The Devil makes work for idling minds.

The original title of the play is Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs and the BFI resurrect this for the dual format release.  Malcom’s initial struggle is simply to get up and we encounter him lying under his standard-issue great coat wrestling with the thorny issue of the moment between thought and expression. John Hurt is Malcom Scrawdyke and he plays superbly throughout reprising a role he had originally performed on stage.

Talking 'bout a revolution

Hurt’s Malcolm is an opinionated loser who is forever excusing himself not just from the “fascistic” environs of the Technical College but also from taking action even with the girl he fancies - Ann Gedge played by the wonderful Rosalind Ayres (whose eyes properly warrant a blog post all of their own…) her naturalism and balanced reason contrasts with the quirky fearfulness of the men.

Rosalind Ayres

Malcolm pretends to forget he’s due to take Ann to the pictures preferring to discuss the setting up of a “Party” with two of his comrades from the course, the quick-witted Wick Blagdon (John McEnery) and the dopey Irwin (Raymond Platt) – easily led but slow on the uptake. They decide a political party is the only way to gain “power” and to avenge themselves on the corruption of their tutor Phillip Allard – to gain the respect they, as men of vision and talent, inherently deserve.

John McEnery

Malcolm decides that they will be the Party of Dynamic Erection a deliberately incendiary association and one that is little more than a schoolboy joke in terms of actual meaning… until you look at Malcolm’s own situation. He rails against “the Eunuchs” and yet his own ability to function on a sexual level is in question as much as his ability to “not talk, just act”.

A fourth member of the PDE is the permanently duffle-coated Dennis Charles Nipple (David Warner on fine form) who, in spite of the coat and fascination with details, has some experience in matters of the heart and regales the other three at length with exuberant fluidity. Exhausted after recounting his florid tale, Malcolm tries to burst his erotic bubble by describing his lover in less… flattering ways. He needs to knock Dennis down a peg or two and to establish his own credibility. If this woman had been anything like Nipple suggested then surely Malcolm, the Alpha, would have stepped in…

David Warner

The boys act out their planned kidnap of arch enemy Allard to the last detail with Wick playing the victim and Nipple measuring up the pictures they are going to steal to force their tutor to accede to their will. They want to break him and force him to smash up the painting and to thereby admit the worthlessness of art and by extension his teachings.

Wick follows through the emotions until he is exhausted following the violent destruction of an oil painting from their class… It’s a foretaste of the film’s ending and ends with Malcolm comforting the defeated Allard/the Party Hero. These boys have big imaginations… but perhaps they only serve to compensate for disappointing reality?

Things proceed harmlessly; Malcolm delivers ever more belligerent speeches and the others trust grows. Yet there is the matter of Ann and Malcolm is drawn to her but unsure what to do about it… he wanders to her house and, bumping into her, lies that he’s on his way to see a friend. She asks if he wants to go to a gig and he agrees.

At the club the two talk but Malcom doesn’t know how to reach out, Ann smiles to herself and moves closer towards the band as if to reinforce her ability to connect and to just be (“not thinking, just acting”).

Spoilers: Malcolm is sublimating something and his response to this latest humiliation is look for someone else to blame. He’s already described Ann as mocking him by her very look and interest and now he exacts an unpleasant revenge by association on Nipple (well he is human and he has successfully had intercourse…) who faces a tribunal rigged against him. Malcolm asks him to plead guilty or “more guilty”: he can’t win and is sentenced to death at a time and method unspecified. He’s excommunicated and Malcolm revels in the process before Nipple turns in hurt to say that he forgives him… There’s a look in the bully’s face when resistance stops and he has nothing to react against.

But this is as nothing in comparison with Malcolm’s “revenge” on Ann after she runs rings around him in a debate concerning his true feelings… the film enters its most unpleasant phase as Malcolm is revealed to be entirely without substance: only capable of reacting and unable to lead.

“Act, don’t think!” he repeats but the truth is that he can’t really do either and the revolution is permanently postponed.

Dusty verdict: Little Malcolm is superbly directed by Stuart Cooper with immaculate performance all round. It resonates still with its central messages, so don’t think, act and buy a copy now from either the BFI or Amazon.

 

The Scrawdyke Salute!

TGI… Perfect Friday (1970)

This surprisingly snappy film was a vague memory from childhood viewing of a, no doubt heavily censored, version on TV… there’s very little violence but an awful lot of Ursula “Undress” as the wits of the day put it.

Smartly directed by Peter Hall (yes, that one: father of Rebecca and now a Sir…) it’s an ostensible straightforward turn of the decade heist movie which features a still unpredictable plot and three very strong leads. Its narrative structure is also unusual with deft turns in time which explain and elaborate on what could have been a less straight-ahead story.

The Office...Stanley Baker with TP McKenna next door

Hall keeps us on our toes throughout and it’s only when the robbery actually takes place when the viewer sees how it is to be done… not quite The Italian Job!

Stanley Baker (who also produced) plays Mr Graham a seemingly straight-laced Assistant Bank Manager with a great future behind him and a predictable course set ahead.

The film opens with a brief encounter with him telling an shadowy individual that he’s going to get some money… the titles roll in a computer-typeface over the modern London where Graham’s bank is located (Regents Park?). He walks into his glass office next to an identical unit housing Mr Smith (the great TP McKenna) and another, larger, room in which their boss Mr Williams (David Waller) practices his golf stroke.

Mr Graham has a meeting with Lady Britt Dorset (Ursula Andress) who is in need of a loan, too enable her to see her ill father back in Switzerland… She is granted £500 and two months in which to pay it back… now that’s what I call British banking!

Ursula Andress and Stanley Baker

The story is a ruse to allow her some funds to buy a new car – a splendid 1966 Sunbeam Alpine Series V – along with some new clothes. Taking a shine to her new financial friend she picks him up for dinner and explains the ploy.

A suit turns out, Britt’s dishonesty is exactly what Graham has been looking for – it’s unclear whether he arranged their first meeting… especially as their further connections are revealed.

Their date goes well and the Lady and the Bank Manager find themselves in bed – they obviously have more in common than at first appeared.

A boat briefing as they pass the old Southbank...

Graham begins to explain his true plans to Britt who volunteers her good-for-very-little, husband as a further accomplice.

But it seems that Graham and Lord Nicholas Dorset (David Warner) have already met – and it was "Nick" who suggested his wife as the potential third member of their putative gang… just one of many twists and turns that keeps things away from predictable.

Graham issues Britt and Nick with explicit instructions which verge on the over-cautious. He insists on their telling only the truth and feeds them both lines that he knows will come back to him unadulterated by their own agendas.

Nick is sent on various errands – to Amsterdam to buy a wig and elsewhere – untraceable steps in a larger caper. And, all the while Graham and Britt continue their bed-based intimacy… not that Britt and Nick have fallen out of their own habit.

Another side of Ursula...

Every Friday the bank sends an employee to count the money in the safe.  The person is identified with a passport and accompanied by the manager, Mr Williams. But Williams’ fondness for golf leads him to occasionally feign sickness in order to get a head start for weekend tournaments… and, when he’s away, Smith and Graham deputise in accompanying the teller…

All clear?

Now Graham has worked out a way to use this to his advantage and it would be churlish to reveal how this will be done, especially as the film takes so long to reveal the plot.

Needless to say, both Nick and Britt are heavily involved and everything is timed to perfection… well, almost everything…

The heist gets postponed in the nick of time and tension builds… can any of these people really trust each other: it’s not a question of will they get away with it but who will get away with it?

David Warner is his usual unsettling self - reminding me a lot of Rhys Ifans, a world-weary lothario who is just about likeable.

The face...

This is one of the best things I’ve seen Ursula Andress in and she acts with a subtlety that allows her natural beauty to come through much more than in her more overtly vampish roles… She has a good chemistry with Baxter and her sense of humour is reigned in to allow more sophisticated jokes to be made than in say, What’s New Pussycat?

Baker is also superb acting against type as the timid but determined Graham. Even the comb-over hair and appalling moustache can’t dent his masculine edge but he obviously relished the chance to play the blue-colour criminal.

Warner and Baker

Hall directs with invention and youthful zest and all is topped off by a superb score from John Dankworth (he also became a Sir later.)

Dusty verdict: An enjoyable crime caper with a little more under the bonnet than others of the same vintage may lead you to expect.

Now available on Blu-ray and DVD from those nice people at Network… it’s worth buying and re-watching every ten years as you’re bound to forget the plot details.

The Sunbeam Alpine

Tea and toast