What some men will go through in order to win their ex- wife back forms the basis for this 1966 film farce.David Warner gives quite a display as the rejected husband who shall resort to just about anything to get his recently divorced wife, Vanessa Redgrave, in a totally ridiculous Oscar nominated performance by her, to get her to return to him.Warner goes completely berserk in the film,wire tapping and doing all sorts of mayhem.Redgrave comes from a rich family and how she ever had married the Warner character, a pure bred Communist, is beyond me. Irene Handl as his mother is effective in attempting to understand his off- the-wall behavior.The picture just goes from one crazy routine to another and the emulation of King Cong by its end is most ridiculous at best. The ending at the asylum with the hammer and sickle, symbols of Communism is most appropriate. It's just that someone should have taken a hammer and sickle to the entire movie.

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.

I was moderately charmed by 'Morgan' when I first saw it in 1966, partly because it afforded a (romanticized) view of Swinging London and it has its absurdist moments. Watching it again after 42 years, however, I was repelled by Morgan's vandalism and obsessive behavior--we would now call it stalking--and the seeming helplessness of the people he is determined to harass. Morgan's 'eccentricity' wears very thin very quickly, and he becomes tedious and offensive; in the end, one longs for him to be punished and suffer. Stuffed shirts like his nemesis Charles Napier are always cinema villains, but I found him sympathetic under the circumstances. Irene Handl, as always, is delightful as Morgan's long-suffering, class conscious, Marxist mum, and we see Vanessa Redgrave before her Madame DeFarge period. In the end, a waste of David Warner's considerable (comic) talents.

I saw this when it was new and I was a precocious child. I thought I understood books like "Madame Bovary" and "War and Peace." And I thought this was a thrilling movie.Lo! These many years later, it seems annoying and juvenile. During this period, and for several years after it, people with mental illness were portrayed as heroes, as misunderstood, as charming and denied of their rights.The title character seems now like a royal pain. David Warner plays him well but what in the world is he playing? A Trotskyite who likes animals and acts like a destructive eight-year-old. Vanessa Redgrave is pretty and good but gives no real sense of the magnificence of her acting that we were soon to learn about.Only two years later, the same director presented her as the title character in "Isadora." My memory of that is of a lovely movie, filled with beautiful music. ("Morgan" uses classical music well also, it must be said.) Of his American movies, I adore "Sweet Dreams," which I saw three or four times in theaters and many more times on tape. And he produced the excellent "This Sporting Life." I'll be honest, though: I watched this all the way through but couldn't wait for it to be over.