Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment

The film's full title seems perfectly apt. It appears to be about a character afflicted with mental illness, yet also a personality whose madness, eccentricity, or romanticism makes him an almost magnificent, even supreme figure (in English, the word "character" means both: not only a person in a story, but also a striking personality).

In this sense, Morgan, the most original film from Reisz's British period, can be understood almost as an artistic manifesto. The titular Morgan, a schizophrenic at large, a London communist who paints hammers and sickles on any available surface, an artist with the imagination of a cartoon character, transforms his life into a continuous happening to sweep others into a whirlwind that would shuffle the cards anew.

As the hero of a (tragic) comedy about rediscovering marriage, Morgan constantly intrudes into the life of his ex-wife and enchants her world. She is a typical British bourgeois woman who - at least to some extent - enjoys the thrill of uncertainty that Morgan brings her.

In reality, however, each of Reisz's characters yearns to shake the society of their time, the society that binds them, and turn it inside out. No one wants to surrender, even if it costs them their life or reputation as a madman - which are the only ways to escape the grip. All of Reisz's characters are, in their own way, personal revolutionaries. Morgan therefore thinks the same as his dear Karl Marx: he does not just want to understand the world, he wants to transform it.