Review of Morgan!

Offbeat director Karel Reisz was behind the camera for some noteworthy films in his day including "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "The French Lieutenant's Woman." Unfortunately, his 1966 movie "Morgan!" isn't one of them. Its threadbare one-joke plot runs thin after a half hour and all that's left is some surrealism regarding the Marxists and a British fellow with a gorilla fixation. A young David Warner plays the title character. He's a fragile "artist" ready for a strait-jacket who's attempting to win back his ex-wife (Vanessa Redgrave before she became a communist) by acting like the lunatic he is. The highlight of the film is when he crashes her wedding ceremony (dressed up like a gorilla) to stiff-upper-lip Robert Stephens while their party guests have a collective fit. He then hops onto a motorbike while his costume's on fire and drives himself straight into the Thames. From there, the film quickly becomes a baffling amalgam of some Leninist babble coupled with a nonsensical and very staged mock execution. We then see Morgan led away and reappearing in an asylum for the insane tending to his "hammer and sickle" garden. His ex-wife also shows up (and pregnant) but it all may be just a figment of his lively imagination. How Ms. Redgrave secured an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress with this performance is a great Hollywood mystery that will never be solved. As for David Warner, he went on to a solid career, mostly as a character actor, and has carried on admirably in his profession despite this role. Needless to say, "Morgan!" did not make him an international star. Irene Handl is also in the cast as Morgan's mixed-up leftist/communist mother. With her parental guidance, it's no wonder he goes off the deep end. Maybe the point was that you have to be really crazy to be a communist. Viewers will find that you also have to be half-mad to sit through this entire movie. As for the "Swinging London" backdrop, it's about as exciting as Fresno on a bad day. "Morgan!" is a dated embarrassment to be seen by the curious only.