From an alcohol-drenched lair he burst, literally firing from all cylinders. Screen legend Dennis Hopper is known as one of Hollywood’s great proponents of method acting, which in the case of Philippe Mora’s 1976 Australian classic Mad Dog Morgan meant drinking prodigious amounts of booze and behaving like a lunatic.
Stories about Hopper’s wicked gonzo ways and the (fermented) juice that fuelled his performance as the film’s eponymous 19th century bushranger are many, recapped by Mora in this anecdote-laden piece published shortly before the actor’s death.
By all accounts the shoot was a wild ride, and the madness didn’t end when cameras stopped rolling. After filming wrapped, Hopper visited the grave of the real Morgan (believed to have inspired Ned Kelly), drank a bottle of rum and got arrested and deported the following day “with a blood-alcohol reading that said he should have been clinically dead”.
Failing to make a living from the gold rushes, Morgan fends for himself in the outback and is drawn into a life of crime that sees him locked away for six years. Raped and brutalised, he emerges as a wild outlaw who wreaks a violent path across provincial New South Wales with an Indigenous partner-in-crime named Billy (David Gulpilil).
The film starts slowly but clicks into higher gear when bands of authorities including one played by the late, great Bill Hunter swear black and blue that the lawbreaker’s hide (or scrotum – “it might make a good tobacco pouch” says one) will be theirs, and attempt to prevent him crossing the border into Victoria.
“If Morgan crosses the river he will not last 24 hours in Victoria. He will be relentlessly and mercilessly cut down,” says a politician to the press, and at least on the latter he is right. Morgan crosses the river and – like Hopper after a meal of rum and amphetamines – there ain’t no stopping him, at least until a torrent of bullets finally takes him down.
With the exception of a dream-like scene edited in reverse, depicting a man on fire leaping from a cliff into a river, Mad Dog Morgan is mostly shot in a classical style, with naturalistic editing and lots of mid-shots.
Morgan is a great Australian character, part of a long pantheon of mythic-like outlaws and renegade folk heros partly motivated by deep-seated disrespect for authorities. Dennis Hopper’s all-guns-blazing style was a perfect fit; his monstrously good performance is true to one character’s description of Morgan as “half human, half animal.”
And yet Mora appears to be cautious about shaping the film around his performance, as if he were concerned (perhaps understandably) that doing so might jeopardise the rest of the production. The director keeps his character in perspective physically – there aren’t many close-ups of Hopper, almost as if the camera was afraid to go there – and inter-personally, giving the supporting cast, who are far less interesting, considerable time and space.
Perhaps Mora thought focusing too heavily on Hopper could derail everything, including the actor’s career. But it also says something of the director’s lack of ability – or lack of guts – to make the most out of a performance so rare and special, so full of recklessness and bravado. In his defense, Hopper was the first Hollywood star Mora had ever worked with and Mad Dog Morgan his first feature film.
In the DVD extras, Mora recalls how David Gulpilil went walkabout mid-shoot and the crew sent Aboriginal trackers to find him. When he returned, Gulpilil explained that he had gone to ask the kookaburras and the trees what they thought about Hopper.
“They all say Dennis is crazy,” Gulpilil said. Mora responded: “I could have told you that.”
