MAGNET contributing editor Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’30s through the ’70s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every Friday.
Morgan! (1966, 97 minutes)
Morgan Delt is being divorced by his wife, and he’s not happy about it. Leonie (Vanessa Redgrave in her screen debut) has finally had enough of the screwball antics and abnormal behavior of Morgan (David Warner), a once-promising painter who hasn’t put brush to canvas in a long time. She’s about to marry art-gallery owner Charles Napier (Robert Stephens) once her divorce decree becomes final, and Morgan is constantly cooking up ways to thwart this unholy union. But his plans are often sidetracked by daydreams of gorillas in faraway jungles, as well as the halcyon days of Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx and the Russian Revolution.
Rummaging about his large London home—which appears to have been decorated by Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum—Morgan puts a human skeleton under the covers on his side of the bed to be discovered by Leonie and Napier as they’re about to take a nap. “I have fantasies, but I act mine out,” he tells a frantic Leonie after Napier has gone to consult an attorney about a restraining order. Always lurking about the place like the Phantom of the Opera, Morgan climbs the stairs to his studio, lugs an oversized stuffed gorilla out of storage and devises a scheme to put a small explosive charge under Leonie’s bed.
With a police constable (Bernard Bressler) now keeping an eye on the Delts’ place, Morgan and his gorilla are reduced to living in his car, parked outside his home and decorated with slogans from the Russian Revolution. “I’m an exile waiting for the icepick,” he tells the bewildered copper, referring to the 1940 assassination of Revolution co-founder Leon Trotsky by Joe Stalin’s boys.
Back inside again, Morgan shows a rattled Leonie a parlor trick he’s just learned. “This is the kind of thing that has to be done with complete confidence,” he says as he prepares to yank the tablecloth out from under a complete set of dinner dishes on the dining room table. Everything goes flying in a hailstorm of shattered crockery. “You’re the one thing that’s lived up to my best fantasies,” Morgan confesses to Leonie as they collapse onto their bed in one last show of affection.
Most of this Karel Reisz-directed 1966 gem takes place with “Swinging London” as a backdrop, but its most poignant scene occurs in an overgrown Highgate Cemetery. Morgan has taken his mum (Irene Handl), a lifelong communist, to the gravesite of Karl Marx, designated by a hulking sculpture of the radical thinker. “Your dad was an idealist,” Mrs. Delt tells Morgan. “He wanted to shoot the royal family, abolish marriage and put everybody who’d been to public school on a chain gang.” Though somewhat less violent, Morgan’s demented world view is every bit as unworkable as his dad’s.
