A Sad Case

Comedy is truer than naturalism. After the romance of the North, those wild nights and drunken parties, Karel Reisz returns to London, with a hangover. Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment. The love affair with the working-class is over. Supposed to be a short trip, it went on too long, and has turned ugly. Leonie is keen to get back home.

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It begins in the zoo, with a helpful guide, who informs us that gorillas have had a bad press; they are not aggressive carnivores but gentle vegetarians who live amicably together in small communities. We think of hippies in a commune.

At film’s end the gorilla returns to stereotype; running wild, devastating a wedding party. But appearances remain deceptive: it is Morgan Delt in a gorilla suit. What began as a metaphor is transformed into literal fact; Morgan so desperate to keep Leonie he turns into a mad beast, with all reason and restraint lost. For hope vanishes on Mrs Charles Napier’s wedding day, and with it Morgan’s sanity.

The madness of divorce, when one partner will not be separated into two halves. Morgan’s life collapsing he turns weak and tyrannical. Less a person than a ravenous animal, who’ll do anything to stay alive. Addiction to a single desire reducing the jungle of the thinking mind to the desert of monomania. It makes others nervous. Terrifying in its way, for squeezed into the tight corner of this man’s obsession - a mad need to keep her - Leonie feels she’ll never escape such fanatic attention.

In himself Morgan is not a strange and thus scary primate. Much of the soft lover remains; it is why Leonie still feels something for him; these feelings complicated; vestiges of warmth, but also pity for his pathetic feebleness, for this little boy who will not grow up. There is sexual desire. As well as anger and hate; though the biggest sentiment is irritation. A fake gorilla the embodiment of what Leonie feels about Morgan. She knows he is harmless - like Charles she treats his aggression as a joke - but is oppressed by his attention, his relentless attempts to win her back; these sometimes successful - love dies slowly - but lapses only from a decision that is irrevocable: Leonie cannot live with this “gifted idiot”. No mature woman to live long with an adolescent lover.

What was once a joke - the fluffy gorilla in the corner of the studio - becomes, through the relentlessness of thwarted desire, an ugly and oppressive thing: Morgan in a gorilla suit terrorising the wedding guests. A game has become serious, a toy turned into a rampaging animal, who overwhelms all civil relationships. Unable to accept a worldview so radically different from his own - he is impervious to his own faults - this fluff-ball of man turns nasty. Too mad for society, he can only live behind bars. This beast must be returned to the zoo.

Morgan is intensely irritating. We want him removed from the screen.1 Piss off you scamp! It is hard to like a man who remains emotionally a child; his jokes quickly pall; we tire of his obtuseness, his inability to comprehend our self, our needs. There is no empathy here; just me! me! me! Children so greedy for attention, energy, love. But to return the gift…what a strange idea! The presents Morgan Delt hands out are those that increase his own worth. His mind a house he rarely leaves; on those excursions to shop or friend he carries most of the furniture with him. Home from home. The divorce is forcing Morgan out of the house; now he must look on Leonie as an individual, separate from himself. It is impossible. He cannot learn from, only reject, a situation that doesn’t respond to his needs, his interventions. Failing to get the desired response he retreats to the house; the windows mirrors, the blinds a calligraphy of his sad thoughts…only his own pain can he see, understand. That he is hurting Leonie? For all the love talk she is but an object he has lost and which it is his right to reclaim. Horrible but also weak. Such vulnerability attracts pity and affection; when they meet Leonie is a mother comforting an unhappy son; a feeling made ambiguous by their history, and which resolves itself into sex. In the morning she regrets a mistake. Morgan is ecstatic: this is proof of his wife’s love. Once again he becomes overbearing and obnoxious.

Never marry a cuddly toy.

Such a character study should be tragic. Reisz turns it brilliantly into a comedy, which captures the mixed feelings of Leonie and Charles, who though irritated by Morgan cannot take him seriously; all his posturing - with gun, knife and knuckleduster; his big talk about rape - they treat with jocular contempt. A child who won’t learn his lessons. Nevertheless, even exceptionally liberal and clever people have limits to their tolerance. Morgan goes too far. Don’t kidnap your ex-wife. We can’t force another person to live inside our fantasies. No amount of dreaming to convince Leonie a beautiful Welsh lake is anything but a prison.

We are getting closer and closer to the zoo.

Godard has arrived in Britain, in Southend on a windy day; wearing yellow wellington boots, a black mack, and a newspaper hat, he sits in the deck chair complaining about the young, splashing everyone with sand; the wife pouring out a half-pint of porter. She hands him the full glass: “it’s gonna be a lovely day today, dear.” For a few hours this quintessential Frenchman has become a Brit. All the cinematic tricks of the Nouvelle Vague are on show in Reisz’s film, but tweaked to the comedic sensibility of the English music hall, which turns the avant-garde - freeze frames, fast forwards, fantasy sequences - into a mainstream movie. Even the politics becomes farce: a typical working class mum is a Stalinist, who calls her son a class traitor and enjoys repeating the sayings of her dead husband, who spouted the most extreme ideas, such as putting public school boys in chain gangs. She likes Leonie: “a lovely girl that”. Ideas and life comically far apart (as they should be when so extreme). They meet only when Mrs Delt and Wally the Gorilla (a wrestler past his sell-by-date) walk in front of a Daimler, causing to it drive at an excruciatingly slow pace. “The workers paid for that”, is her considered view.

Morgan hasn't grown up. He has talent. But he is not mature enough to develop his artistic bent. Without an adult will he lacks purpose, and floats around on his feelings and ideas; dreams replacing application, Morgan lives a teenage fairy tale. Mothers are lenient to such behaviour. Wives and the rest of the human race are not. Morgan cannot grasp this simple fact. His boyishness gives him a compelling charm, which this attracts people towards him; like the policeman intrigued by his bizarre car - full of junk and Trotskyist propaganda it doubles up as a mobile bedroom - and odd behaviour: he shaves in the street. The charm quickly fades. They soon tire of his antics, are bored with a personality concerned only with itself, unable to meld with others. The second time the policeman approaches the car he hears awful animal noises; they scare him and he runs away: Morgan is testing a sound trap, to catch Leonie and Charles making love. A life in two scenes. First he attracts. Then he repels. His good looks, his charm, his high jinx rapidly bore; the routines become repetitive, the practical jokes annoy; his self-centredness oppresses. Like living with an alien. Though it is not the usual selfishness. Morgan lives inside his own dreams, which give an amusing but distorted vision of the world, where nobody can exist as a good person unless they believe in his fantastic tales. Only those in accord with his imagination are not selfish, stupid or - bizarrely - egotistical. Inevitably the result is caricature and cartoon.2 Thus the animals that populate this film. Unable to fully engage with the sensibilities of others, Morgan reduces our complex personalities to beast-like automata.

Morgan isn’t just a child. His name reveals another relationship: between the classes. After the heyday of the late Fifties, when the workers seemed set to join the upper ranks, we have now entered the 1960s, where romance is giving way to realism, as the (few) upwardly mobile workers, unable adapt to the mores of the rich, are now treated as tiresome interlopers. The morganatic marriage is over. The rich have had enough. Time for a divorce! Back to the well-tested relationships with those of their own class.

It is important that Morgan is an artist. Leonie wouldn’t have met him outside the peculiar atmosphere of the early 1960s, when bohemia replaced the provinces as the fashionable milieu. Leonie, like Jane in the L-Shaped Room, desires a more exciting life, the London scene offering freedom from the dull comforts of a bourgeois home. But after a few years the excitement goes. Bohemia has its own routines, and is, if anything, more boring than the parental home.3 “I can’t live with this insecurity”, she says. Stability is uppermost now.

It is a sharp jolt for the viewer. By the mid-1960s the radical tide - social miscegenation - had turned; the affair with the workers now believed as a pleasant but ultimately unsatisfying adventure; to end at once.4 Of course this film has its own twist. The parents of the couple are honest: on both sides they are against cross class breeding. A liberal like Reisz cannot admit that class obstacles are insurmountable. So he disguises it a little. Thus we have the odd (Morgan) and the (wayward) Leonie crossing class boundaries, but creating a relationship that is intense but unstable, and therefore cannot last. Thus our Karel can blame art and the capitalist system (why isn’t it a Disneyland where every artist can be free?). But we are not fooled, we know what’s going on.

Morgan is confined to a mental institution. A character inside his own film - King Kong running around London in a slapstick comedy - a fantasy life colonising a mind. Morgan is mad. Leonie comes to visit him. She is pregnant. In typical fashion he asks straight out: is that my baby? She nods half-reluctantly. Though they have parted, though the great dream of class mixing - that social cocktail - has failed, something will live on; these social worlds have changed, just a little.

Morgan is such an ambivalent character that we wonder how much Reisz identifies with him. He could represent the vitalistic outsider whose imagination alienates him from the rest of society. He might be the artist who, under pressure of new kinds of entertainment, we think of film, has been transformed into a comedian, who no-one takes seriously anymore. Or is Reisz reflecting back on his own political views, satirising his previous naivety, his lack of sophistication and social awareness? Morgan. Good or bad? Irritating or charming? It is left to the audience to decide.

Review: Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment

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1. Compare with the anti-hero in Herostratus. It is the pushiness of the 1960s young that is so unappealing. They won’t listen to anybody; only themselves count, matter, are to be heard. On and on and on they go.

2.  The best description of this world is The Horse’s Mouth, by Joyce Cary. But note: Gulley Jimson is a productive artist, able to go with the flow of life. This became a philosophy with Auguste Renoir: Jean Renoir, My Father. These characters are thus free from that terrible self-righteousness that can affect such characters when the world turns against them.

3.  Nicely conveyed in Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho.

4.  The political radicalism of the very late Sixties was the middle-class attempt to change the workers into the middle-class image of what a worker should be.