R4 DVD
Umbrella Entertainment
Mad Dog
Morgan is a truly impressive piece of Australian cinema, starring just about
everybody who was anybody in the Australian film industry of the time from Jack
Thompson, Frank Thring, Michael Pate, Graeme Blundell and Bill Hunter to David
Gulpilil. In addition it stars the truly eccentric and bizarre Dennis Hopper.
It is a quirky film based on the true story of Irish outlaw Dan Morgan and yet
presented in a way that is truly sympathetic to the outlaw way of life and the
conditions that forced many people to live beyond the law.
Mad Dog
Morgan is set in the harsh landscape of Australia in the 1850s. Daniel Morgan
has come from Ireland to try and seek his fortune in a land very different from
his own. He works the goldfields and tries to make a living and yet witnesses a
police snitch set up those around who work without licenses, rather than persecuting
them the police simply kill them in cold blood without a second thought. Morgan
escapes, yet his hatred of authority has now reached breaking point. He takes
to a life of crime but is caught on his first highway robbery and sentenced to
12 years of hard labour. As the Judge remarks to a friend, he gives harsh
sentences as more roads need to be made, there seems to be little justice in
early Australia. During the first period of his sentence he is branded, beaten
and sodomized and then forced into hard labour breaking stones.
Morgan bides his time and on release
plans his revenge. He steals a horse yet is shot in the shoulder. Luckily, he
meets a local aboriginal called Billy who heals his wounds and becomes his
constant companion. Together they work to exact Morgan’s revenge and along the
way right the wrongs of workers underpaid and mistreated. The scene in the film
where Morgan forces a landowner to pay his workers extra cash payments is based
on fact. Indeed, much of the film is based on solid historical research.
This is an
unusual film, at times it has nearly art film like sequences (such as when
Morgan is practising to become a bushranger), at other times it has scenes of
great cinematic beauty showing the Australian landscape and aboriginal dances
and customs. Indeed, the sheer number of locations, buildings and re-creations
used in the film are astounding.
The
friendship between Morgan and Billy is endearing and at time seems almost
homo-erotic, the depth of feeling
displayed between them is palpable. At the same time Morgan’s mood changes and
drinking are truly frightening. Dennis Hopper as Morgan is an inspired choice,
well known for his drug and drinking problems interviews about the film make it
clear Hopper was regularly smashed on set and yet just seems to add to the
authenticity of the character !
Many of the
characters in the film are superbly overdone such as Frank Thring as the deliriously
nasty Victorian Police Superintendent Cobham who wants to keep Morgan’s scrotum
as a tobacco pouch. It is as though there is a deliberate attempt to play
certain roles over the top to create a mood of “caricature” which ridicules the
authorities of the period.
Mad Dog
Morgan is certainly an unusual film, it is hard to put it into a single genre –
it is at times exploitation cinema with deliberately over the top characters,
at other times a beautifully done period piece. Sometimes it plays like a “Robin
Hood” outlaw movie, other times like a character study of those pushed beyond
the brink by a vicious and callous legal system. However, we define Mad Dog
Morgan, it is a very significant film.
This review will appear in Volume 2 No.2
(2009) of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.
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