Mad Dog Morgan (1976) A nonchalantly average & confused Australian Western (Review)

For a brief period of time, it seemed as if Dennis Hopper was going to be one of the brightest stars of Hollywood. After appearing in a string of mostly low budget films in the 60s (The Trip, Night Tide, Cool Hand Luke etc) his popularity culminated in Easy Rider, one of the most influential films of the decade and one of the key initiators of the New Hollywood era. Being made on a low budget of around 400 thousand dollars and making 60 million dollars the film opened the doors wide for unconventional films and independent filmmakers to work inside the studio systems, as they now wanted to capitalise on these profit turning, low budget independent films.

Based on this success, Universal gave five directors one million dollars to make a film where they have virtually total creative control, in hopes that one of these would be as profitable as Easy Rider was. These projects included George Lucas’ American Graffiti and Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand but it also included Hopper’s now-infamous follow up The Last Movie. Giving free rein to Hopper in the 70s was definitely a risky move as he had a notoriously bad addiction to alcohol and drugs alongside having a general rebellious attitude. Instead of making the film that was written in the allotted time, Hopper took to Peru, invited all his friends, filmed them and made a film that was in no way what was supposed to be delivered. Plus he spent months holed up editing the film repeatedly which caused the film to be released a lot later than intended.

The relevance of all this is the long-lasting effect of this colossal failure in the eyes of Universal (although The Last Movie is a genuinely excellent and surreal film) was Hopper’s unofficial exile from Hollywood. After gaining a terrible reputation of being incredibly hard to work with he was practically unable to find work in mainstream American cinema (until Apocalypse Now). This forced him into working in low budget and mostly European art films for a decade and swiftly ended his directing career, until the 80s with the fantastic Out of the Blue. With these films, Hopper became an archetypal manic man whose characters were often alcoholics with frequent outbursts of mayhem and unhinged behaviour – almost as if he wasn’t even acting. This typecasting would mostly stay with Hopper until his passing in 2010.

Philippe Mora’s 1976 Ozploitation film Mad Dog Morgan follows this trend and stars Hopper as the Bushranger Daniel Morgan who is based on a real-life character who was alive in the Colonial period in Australia. Being a somewhat biopic this film follows a fairly large period of time, covering Morgan’s first arrest, jail time and leading up to his ultimate death at the hands of the police force. The first thing that is noticed is the absolutely suspect Irish accent that Hopper is doing which constantly seems to disappear and reappear depending on how much alcohol his character has consumed. However bad it is, it remains consistently funny and adds to the overall low budget feel of the film.

One thing that never really made sense was the purpose of Morgan himself. At times he is portrayed as a Robin Hood-like character; one scene has him stealing a bunch of cheques from a landowner and handing them out to his workers and another has a character claiming that Morgan has “scared the piss out of every rich landowner”. Due to this, it seems that the population holds him in high regard. Especially when compared to how they treat the police force who are pretty much represented entirely as bumbling idiots throughout. On the contrary, Morgan is also depicted as an alcoholic who is constantly drunk and lashing out for almost no reason – including a scene where he shoots a guy cause he imagined someone was shooting at him. It is unclear whether the film wants you to root for him or hold him in disdain, or even treat him as a misunderstood tragedy.

Whilst the first 40 minutes are reasonably enjoyable and, due to the frantic pacing, go by pretty quickly; the film rapidly falls into a pit of nothing where the film runs out of steam and hasn’t really got anywhere to go. This leads to a final act that is incredibly dull, which is quite disappointing. Virtually nothing happens in the last 30 minutes except for a very brief burst of violence towards the end. It really needed some action or an exciting set-piece to actually bring it all together. Instead of doing this, however, it throws in a random and totally unexplained dream sequence that is played in reverse – which adds very little to the plot. Despite the plot issues the film can look gorgeous at times and makes brilliant use of the Australian wilderness. Plus it features some really great indigenous music on the soundtrack which is a real highlight.

For people who love Dennis Hopper and find his incredibly chaotic career in the film industry to be fascinating, then this film will probably be worth giving a watch. If not then this is mostly just a below-average Australian Western. Although the antics behind the film are arguably much more interesting than the final product. It is said at the end of filming Hopper “Rode off in costume, poured a bottle of O.P. rum into the real Morgan’s grave in front of my mother Mirka Mora, drank one himself, got arrested and deported the next day, with a blood-alcohol reading that said he should have been clinically dead, according to the judge studying his alcohol tests.” Although anyone interested in the film’s lore will be satisfied with the myriad of features included, including behind the scenes footage and interviews with Hopper and director Philippe Mora.

Autumn’s Archive – Mad Dog Morgan