Review of Mad Dog Morgan (1976) by Jeremy C — 08 Feb 2014

From the Mill Creek 20 Movie Mean Guns Collection. Mad Dog Morgan is a real rarity, which is a great shame, because Philip Mora's film has much to recommend it and deserves much better than a dodgy cropped transfer on the Mill Creek label. More a chronicle of the exploits of 'Mad Dog' Morgan, the bushranger who inspired Ned Kelly, than a conventional narrative, it's a non-judgemental portrait of an inconsistent, unpredictable man - after going to great lengths to deny he'll ever "be made a murderer," he then becomes one almost immediately when he drunkenly sets his gun off, wounding his host, and then hurrying off to kill the man that he himself has just sent after a doctor. It's very much a seventies film (in the best sense), with a sense of the violence of both the landscape and the people trying to eke a living from it, and it constantly surprises with neat little details such as the magistrate who doles out long sentences simply because there are still so many roads to build.

Despite being made at the height of his drugs-and-booze lost period, Dennis Hopper gives a pretty good performance as the naïve and contradictory folk hero cum psychopath, even managing a fairly convincing Irish accent (I'm sure th Irish could find fault, but it never makes you cringe). There's an impressive supporting cast of familiar Aussie faces, not least Gulpilil as Morgan's beloved partner in crime and Frank Thring at his most superciliously unpleasant as the Superintendent: few actors could seem more natural when he and his social circle start casually divvying up Morgan's body parts in the final scene (the head for an anthropologist, the scrotum for the Superintendent's new tobacco pouch). Although not overly graphic, it's still fairly strong meat. 3 stars 2-3-14.