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

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The opening scene features the hero – David Warner’s unravelling artist – admiring Guy, the gorilla at London zoo. My brothers and I were taken behind the scenes and got a chance to meet the orangutans – miles more thrilling than any of our brief encounters with movie stars. 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.” Next came my father’s first and probably best-known feature film: Saturday Night and Saturday Morning (1960), based on Alan Sillitoe’s bestselling novel, and starring a young Albert Finney as a factory worker in Nottingham. He sets out his philosophy of life at his lathe: “What I’m out for is a good time. All the rest is propaganda … Don’t let the bastards grind you down!” David Warner was a distinguished English Shakespearean actor, in fact one of the great stage Hamlets of his generation but, in movie terms, and especially as he got older, his strong, intelligent face and equine handsomeness almost made him the English Max von Sydow, eminently castable in supporting character roles as troubled or darkly villainous people in scary films.

David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966). Photograph: British Lion Film Corporation/AllstarMorgan is already there. His dreams are becoming nightmares. As he admits: "Nothing in this world seems to live up to my best fantasies." After disrupting Charles and Leonie's wedding – dressed up in a gorilla suit, spurred on by intercut clips from the 1933 version of King Kong – Morgan speeds off on a purloined motorbike, his suit smouldering, along a Park Lane still in the throes of redevelopment, in a wonderful shot. Formally, Morgan marks the moment when British social realism moved into a surrealistic depiction of inner psychological states. Karel Reisz had already made his name as a founder member of the Free Cinema documentary movement: 1959's We Are the Lambeth Boys was a groundbreaking look at young working-class life, while 1960's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning showed naturalism could be big box office. 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.” He was sanguine about the parts that came his way, insisting that “one cannot live on Vanyas alone” and calling himself a “letterbox actor” – “If the script comes through the letterbox, I’ll do it.” Like Mercer himself, Morgan has made it. But the gulf between his hardcore Stalinist upbringing and the new, apparently classless metropolitan consumer culture is beginning to tear him apart. And so a comedy of manners begins to tip into something darker. Morgan appears to be a bumbling fool, but he is also the fool in an older, deeper sense: the jester who strips away the veils of illusion to reveal an unpalatable truth.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’s fractured personality soon regresses and becomes fixated on a new alter ego - that of a gorilla. He dons an ape costume and enacts the creature’s sounds and movements, which helps him to function in what he has come to believe is a more authentic, less complicated, primitivist mode of existence. It is a coping mechanism by which he can navigate and manage the ‘mad’ world of bourgeois respectability and repressive behaviours. He feels that only his mother, an unreconstructed Stalinist, has any genuine values, but she feels that Morgan is a sell-out. She refuses to ‘de-Stalinise’ and reminds Morgan: ‘Your dad wanted to shoot the royal family, abolish marriage and put everybody who’d been to a public school in a chain gang. He was an idealist, was your dad.’ Morgan Delt, artist, fantasist and socialist, embarks on a series of wild escapades designed to prevent his ex-wife's impending marriage. Show full synopsis 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.

He is survived by his partner, the actor Lisa Bowerman, and by Luke, the child of his second marriage, to Sheilah Kent, which ended in divorce.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”. This sequence was not in David Mercer's original TV play, A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962), transmitted by the BBC as a Sunday Night Play. Now lost, it starred Ian Hendry as Morgan. In the play, Morgan neither dons a gorilla suit to gatecrash his ex-wife's wedding nor ends up in a psychiatric hospital. 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] This scene was not in the first version of this story, which was broadcast as a TV play by the BBC in October 1962, with Ian Hendry in the lead role. The story was written by David Mercer, who had himself experienced severe depression. By the time Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment – directed by Karel Reisz and starring David Warner as Morgan – was released in April 1966, some plot and dialogue remained the same, but the mood was much sharper and harder.