SAFE ASYLUMS FOR TWO
Sklar, Robert
Safe Asylums for Two by ROBERT SKLAR :r|^wo CURRENT British films, Morgan! •*- and Georgy Girl, fit so easily into the familiar mode of youthful British tragi-farce that at first you might...
...Each is a comedy about a young person who is sad and lonely, unhappy and possibly sick...
...with considerable nostalgia and pathos—nowhere more than in the scene of Morgan carrying his mother on his back during a visit to Karl Marx's tomb...
...Georgy ends up married to her wealthy patron...
...They have been accommodated to their social worlds, it may appear, but on the surface only...
...and Georgy Girl, fit so easily into the familiar mode of youthful British tragi-farce that at first you might not notice how far they push the style forward and make it new...
...and Georgy Girl follow the usual style of British tragi-comedies of manners...
...to cope with her world, Georgy can draw only on herself...
...rich visual surfaces which, like glass-bottomed boats, make it possible to view the depths below...
...Georgy Girl is not quite so original as Morgan!, nor does it cut as deep...
...Yet Morgan...
...Meredith takes off, leaving Georgy to stay with Jos and the baby as substitute wife and mother...
...To challenge his world Morgan possessed a fantasy world and an ideology...
...Her parents are servants in a rich businessman's house, but their master, Mr...
...but if they make their endings happy they do so in the Brechtian manner of Threepenny Opera, with a grotesque wink and a grin so wide it hurts...
...even those who love Morgan and Georgy call them freaks...
...Georgy's avid domesticity does not suit Jos, a comic mod played by Alan Bates, and they part...
...Marxism is treated so genially and fondly in Morgan...
...and Georgy Girl give the viewer ROBERT SKLAR, a free lance critic, is an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Michigan...
...At Morgan's disposal in his effort is an incredibly rich visual and symbolic treasure-trove, provided by director Karel Reisz and screenwriter David Mercer...
...is a rare and original film, filled with remarkable visual feats and surprises that words cannot convey...
...the resemblance between the two nevertheless is significant and strong...
...On their surfaces Morgan...
...She puts her fantasy life into practice as a nursery teacher, a kind of Pied Piper showing children how to dance and be free...
...As the movie opens, Morgan's beautiful, rich wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave, is divorcing him...
...and Georgy Girl treat the social system in the tragi-comic manner, as an obvious and even ludicrous subject for satire...
...Safe Asylums for Two by ROBERT SKLAR :r|^wo CURRENT British films, Morgan...
...and Georgy Girl make you smile in the end only to make clear how little the social worlds at their most enlightened and generous can do to fulfill Morgan's and Georgy's deeper needs...
...No wonder the films have been praised by some as revolutionary and condemned by others as confused...
...Tragedy finally merges with the comedy from the firm conviction that change of status must take its human cost—loss of character even for the successful, loss perhaps of life itself for failure...
...When Georgy Girl followed it so closely, one skeptical critic reacted by lumping the two together as messes of "cute infantilism and obsessions and aberrations...
...They have raised their comedies of manners to a point of such exaggeration as a way of signifying that for the deeper problems which concern them, the surface issues of the social system matter not at all...
...Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoon," will be published by Oxford University Press this spring...
...and Georgy Girl portray our worlds so humorously and so comfortably because they regard our worlds as irrelevant to their true concerns...
...The world of youth confronts Georgy with another triangle...
...For a moment the viewer thinks he really dies, but he goes to a mental hospital instead...
...The triangular relationship among Georgy, Mr...
...His station wagon surpasses his studio, and his boyhood room tops them both as a fulfilled adolescent dream of creative clutter...
...The comedy and social satire in Morgan...
...Obviously he had won his wellborn wife by his brilliantly imaginative, playful way of life, but his wild and irresponsible excesses had in turn lost her...
...The odd thing is, both views may be correct, and that anomaly gives these films, beyond the pleasure they afford, a certain importance...
...They never pull the surface out from under you...
...The social world for Georgy, in the film directed by Silvio Narizzano and written by Margaret Forster and Peter Nichols, hangs between two poles— the traditional world of class and wealth and the new world of youthful amorality, in neither of which she is fully at home...
...Marxism is Morgan's principal link to social reality, and Marxist symbols and sympathies are portrayed in Morgan...
...Morgan, played by David Warner, is an avant-garde London painter, son of lower-class, passionately Marxist parents...
...Her parents are happily rid of him, and she intends to marry a cultivated art dealer...
...This creative sublimation for maternity—a substitute in a way for the love she has been denied— finds its most passionate expression in her desire to keep Meredith's baby as her own...
...Georgy's roommate Meredith is having a baby by her boyfriend Jos, so they marry...
...Morgan tries to take her back again, and she seems not unwilling, but his eccentric behavior time and again gets him in trouble...
...She marries Mr...
...Georgy, played by Lynn Redgrave, is oversize: she reminds her father of "some enormous lorry driver," herself of a brontosaurus...
...Georgy is as much an outsider to the conventional world of happiness as is Morgan, and she is not less determined to shape a world where she can live...
...He ends up on a garbage dump in a harrowing tragi-comic scene garishly mingling realism and fantasy, so briliantly handled that you cannot stop laughing even as Morgan imagines his own execution by a firing squad of Marxist partisans...
...But as the satire piles up and up, so broadly and with such banality, one begins to wonder if the films can really mean it—and to suspect that they deliberately do not mean it...
...And for Georgy marriage, too, is an asylum— a refuge, a secure retreat—where she can keep the baby, and also will not change...
...Morgan ends as a gardener in a mental asylum, with a vision of his pregnant wife beside him, happily tending flowers he has grown in the shape of a hammer and sickle...
...Morgan is safely put away, but his hammer and sickle garden indicates he has not been changed...
...and Georgy Girl do not mask, but rather press home, the fact that no valid worlds exist for Morgan and for Georgy other than the worlds they possess in their heads and their hearts...
...His book, "F...
...Meredith wants neither Jos nor the baby, however, and while Georgy and Jos are thrown together so happily in planning for the child, they fall in love...
...they are taken away and proved useless...
...These asylums are places out of harm's way, intended for safety and order, not social or personal change...
...That traumatic and life-shaping event for an earlier generation of radicals provides Morgan...
...with material for slapstick...
...Morgan's inner consciousness is filled with images of jungle and veldt, and no scene from his mind's eye is more moving than his vision in silent slow motion of a giraffe being lassoed and reined in, as Morgan is similarly cornered and captured by his social world...
...Routed, his gorilla-suit on fire, he races across London on a stolen scooter and drives it into the Thames to stop the flames...
...Conservative or radical, happy or sad, tragi-comedies take for granted that the social system is the central, omnipresent fact of life...
...But Marxism is not spared the movie's exaggerated satire, as in the scene when Morgan acts out, with a knife and an egg, the axe-slaying of Trotsky...
...James, and cradles the wailing baby in her arms as they drive off to their honeymoon...
...her father sternly insists she always show gratitude for Mr...
...Gradations of wealth and class and infinite distinctions of speech, dress, and behavior supply endless material for comedies of manners: the brash young always struggle upward, the idle and adventurous rich forever explore the life below...
...In Great Britain the social system possesses writers and dramatists in the same way myths of freedom obsess Americans...
...James, played by James Mason, has taken a shine to Georgy, sent her to finishing school in Switzerland, and is willing to do lots, lots more...
...Finally Morgan projects his fantasy world of beasts into his social world, and dressed in a King Kong outfit he tries to break up the wedding of his former wife to the art dealer...
...And yet you can laugh through these films and walk out feeling glad...
...James offers Georgy a contract (in duplicate) to be his mistress...
...At first glance Morgan...
...Morgan operates a wonderfully inventive and witty world of artifacts, with stuffed gorillas and Marxist keepsakes as his prize possessions...
...James's gifts...
...Yet as the film progresses these worlds are destroyed...
...More closely allied with Morgan's deepest needs are the imagery and symbolism of gorillas...
...because it is no more than one of Morgan's toys, and, like the social system it was meant to explain and change, of no matter for Morgan's real needs...
...They thrust the tragi-comedy out of the social system and into a new concern for the vast, uncharted worlds of freedom...
...has already touched a vein of prophecy for some, and has been greeted as a revolutionary work, a harbinger of a better, freer life...
...Morgan...
...James, and Georgy's parents creates Georgy Girl's opportunity to satirize the social standards of money and deference...
Vol. 31 • March 1967 • No. 3
