Gorilla Tactics

...Axelrod's scenario and direction are the ne plus ultra of cinematic bad taste, blending in equal and unsurpassable measure vulgarity, pretentiousness, inept imitation (usually posing as parody), stupidity, and such a proliferation of stomachturning jokes as would take your average smut peddlar a lifetime to assemble...

...Thus his institutionalization is made to appear, at least superficially, justified, and we are not obliged to take any of the previous sympathy for him seriously...

...At that, Morgan is nothing short of a masterpiece compared to its current American near-equivalent, Lord Love a Duck, George Axelrod's self-styled "black comedy" that is merely a dirt-grey joke-book...

...The fact that Morgan is unreconstructedly planting a flower bed in the shape of a large hammer and sickle is meant to represent a botanical Pyrrhic victory...

...Something like that laughter seems to be ringing in the raves which our reviewers have showered on Morgan...

...But he has other ways, too, of making a nuisance of himself, by playing practical jokes on Napier, Leonie, her family, as well as on a bemused policeman...

...Meanwhile, whatever is smeared on children's thumbs to prevent them from sucking them, should be carefully applied to all of Axelrod's pencils...

...they are merely chronically immature and irresponsible, and they inherit the world...

...Vanessa Redgrave's Leonie is a compilation of clever little mannerisms...

...When the long overdue Pornographers Anonymous is founded, Lord Love a Duck will undoubtedly be part of the daily shock therapy...

...But where is the ultimate popcamp-underground consummation attained...

...A very little of this is funny...

...And, above all, the relationship between these elements of our society is both more comic and more pathetic than Morgan begins to let on to...

...The excellent Robert Stephens doesn't have a chance as Napier...

...that bestiality is put forward as virility...

...The final scene, the ex-wife's visit to the now sequestered hero-feebly reminiscent of the last act of Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and of the close of Bunuel's El-is a lesson in how to equivocate...

...on a ritual Sunday outing to Karl Marx's grave, as a funerary offering...

...Yet the truth is that the Morgans of this world are not certifiably mad, and that they do not end up in asylums...

...Which, let us remember, it well may be, without thereby making the gorilla right...

...Morgan goes to the gorilla and considers his ways...

...Yeah, but where is it...

...Such devices, plus a distracting bit of montage, are supposed to make us overlook the final cowardice and confusion of the film...

...But, someone will say reading these lines, why take it all so seriously, when it's all in fun...

...To the pipe-smoking college sophomore who, with his date, sat next to me, this proved so uproariously funny that he detonated a laugh of whose decibel content no gorilla at mating time need have been ashamed...

...Morgan Delt is an eccentric young proletarian painter now being divorced by his upper-class wife, Leonie, who married him "to achieve a sense of insecurity...

...When all else fails, Reisz speeds up the film...

...so, too, is Morgan's answer to the befuddled peeler's, "You want to watch it...

...Not even the acting, except for that of Irene Handl as Morgan's mother, amounts to much...

...however, the gorilla is not a Marxist, which evens the score...

...that atavism is made to look like liberation and advancement...

...sometimes he is King Kong, frenziedly but pathetically defying the world in lovingly lustful pursuit of Fay Wray-here film clips from these oldies are intercut with the roughly corresponding events in Morgan's life...

...The hero is clearly conceived of as being in the right: His anemie is really bonhomie...

...Worse, the point of view is subhuman, and, to top it all, lacks the courage of its convictions...

...in the living room hangs a huge painting of the beloved ancestor...

...At still other times, he has grandiose hallucinations, which, in technique, are derived from the daydreams in Billy Liar and The Knack...

...Even so, the film does not dare to conclude openly in Morgan's favor...

...David Warner (whom I saw at Stratford-on-Avon as a good Henry VI and a poor Richard II) leaves Morgan as superficial a character as he finds him...

...But the jokes are seldom more than pranks, nastily dangerous ones at that, the liveliness is never more than frenzy, the devices repetitious and overexploited...

...or for a kind of nirvana, like the hero of Life Upside Down-not for mere primitive gorillaism...

...She is already living with Napier, Morgan's smooth art dealer and friend, and plans to marry him...

...It is emblematic of the intellectual and moral anarchy of this film that the hero is for the reversal of mankind's march up from the ape...

...These include blowing up his mother-in-law with the bed supposed to explode under Leonie and Napier, kidnaping Leonie and holding her prisoner by a chilly Welsh lake meant to be romantic, disguising himself as a gorilla to break up her wedding, sneaking loudspeakers into Leonie's bedroom and blasting her and Napier out of their embraces with recorded pandemonium, or merely shaving a hammer and sickle out of Leonie's favorite angora rug, which cannot appreciate it even as much as the poodle might...

...in his last hallucination, Morgan must be shown to be really mad...

...And Karel Reisz's direction merely tries to win the British Gimmick Derby, whose previous winners were Tony Richardson on Tom Jones and Richard Lester on Help...

...In clothes and hairdo, Morgan does his best to emulate his shaggy god, and whenever the spirit moves him-which may be in the subway, to confound a ticket-seller...

...At other times, Morgan has fantasies based on old Hollywood movies: Sometimes he is TarzanWeissmuller disporting himself with Jane in a lagoon and fighting a crocodile barehanded in her defense...

...A sight gag involving a raw egg with which Morgan demonstrates the assassination of Trotsky to a bewildered bobby is modestly amusing...

...But when he shaves a hammer and sickle into her poodle, she proceeds, despite occasional sexual relapses, to divorce him...

...that the child Leonie is about to give birth to is, as she tells Morgan, his (how she can be sure, having blissfully shuttled between her ex and her future, one neither knows nor cares), presumably constitutes a zoological Pyrrhic victory...

...But, then, Axelrod wasn't exactly hatched yesterday, either...

...I've been born into the wrong species," says Morgan, and the context implies that the species is wrong indeed...

...Where in Morgan is there anything as ludicrous and appalling as the real-life fact of the latest Andy Warhol "films" being shown to an invited audience in the conference room of the Rockefeller Foundation...

...Morgan's supreme tribute to his wife, his Morgengabe (or Morgangabe) is, "Nothing in this world seems to live up to my best fantasies, except you.' But what are Morgan's best fantasies...

...Morgan (I shall henceforth spare you that punctuational phallic symbol with which the American title has been decked out) is, nevertheless a paean to the pop mentality, although the ending is a palliative cop-out...

...Cop art...

...It is based on a BBC television play by David Mercer, stars two acclaimed young Shakespeareans, David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, and was directed by Karel Reisz, whose Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, though greatly overrated, exhibited no cultist hallmarks of the underground...

...His studio, in Leonie's and his house, had a beast in view, in the shape of a stuffed gorilla...

...Thus there is, as described by Rex Reed, the "bit where Miss Weld gets a secretarial job to the principal of [her] high school by sitting on his desk and playing with her breasts while he proceeds to scrawl '69' on his memo pad-drool running down his chin-then calmly eats his pencil...

...Morgan is introduced to us at the zoo, studying the gorilla with whom he identifies himself: Large, strong, clever, herbivorous, friendly until aroused-all these things Morgan is, except perhaps herbivorous...

...But in the past the victim was someone who stood for something genuinely or arguably superior to middle-class values-for Franciscan charity, like the heroine of Rossellini's Europe '51...

...I take this scene to be an allegory...

...Neither are their opposites particularly recognizable in what is shown here...

...Tuesday Weld is Axelrod's infantile, pseudo-sexual Muse, the obscene scrawlings are Axelrod's works, and the eating of the pencil, going far beyond mere suggestivity, symbolizes Axelrod's ability to have his naughtiness and eat it, too...

...Bits of King Kong and Tarzan movies-not even original fantasies, only crumbs from another man's trough...

...or in his wife's bedroom, by way of jungle wooing-Morgan starts thumping his chest, grimacing, bellowing, hulking and shambling, in prime primate fashion...

...his anti-intellectualism, parasitism (he lives either off his wife or off his mother), destructiveness, selfishness are presented as spontaneity, naturalness, freedom from inhibitions, and self-realization...

...For fun, I'd rather lead apes in hell...

...The movie tells of Morgan's ever more grotesque stratagems to win back his wife, of his troubled but tender relations with his marvelous Cockney-Marxist mother, and of how his brushes with the bourgeoisie and the law, as he assaults Leonie's privacy, lead to his final crack-up and consignment to a mental institution...

...It is the unhealthy conformity of our society that is to blame for Morgan's end: The asylum symbolizes middle-class suppression of the free spirit-as it has before, in a number of films, novels and plays...

...In two separate scenes, when Morgan feels put upon, he smiles with engaging sheepishness and ingenuously flicks out a switchblade knife...

...To illustrate Morgan's view of himself as a gorilla and of people around him as other species of African fauna, the human action frequently switches to more or less corresponding scenes of jungle wild life...