Equus ***** (1977, Richard Burton, Peter Firth, Colin Blakely, Joan Plowright, Jenny Agutter) – Classic Movie Review 445

In 1977, Peter Firth gets to record his 1973 London National Theatre Old Vic theatre role of a lifetime in this sensitive, beautiful Sidney Lumet-directed version of the highly emotional and deeply unsettling, but illuminating and uplifting Peter Shaffer hit stage play.

Firth plays Alan Strang, a troubled teenage stable boy who’s so tormented by his parents, his religious upbringing and his inability to consummate his love with sexy horse rider Jenny Agutter that he stabs out the horses’ eyes at the stables where he works in Hampshire, England. It’s a uniquely shocking atrocity.

In one of his few first-class late-career performances, a haunted, wrecked, tormented-looking Richard Burton is really very good indeed as Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist who tries to help the lad uncover what’s behind his disturbing obsession with horses. He gives a quite mesmeric performance of a burnt-out case.

It’s the kind of character he shone so brilliantly in, from Night of the Iguana to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Burton comes from the original Broadway transfer production, replacing the original National Theatre’s Alec McCowen. Making the film was part of the deal to do the play.

This is sad in many ways, because McCowen was brilliant on stage, establishing a tremendous special rapport with Firth. McCowen was a name in films around this time. He had a star role in Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), but Burton trumped him on mere star power. Anthony Hopkins took over from Burton on Broadway. How good would he have been in the film! And Dirk Bogarde? He would have be perfect at this time.

At any rate, Burton gained his seventh and final Oscar nomination for acting, six as Best Actor: The Robe (1953), Becket (1964), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Equus. Surprisingly, he never won. He died on August 5 1984, aged only 58.

Colin Blakely and Joan Plowright are effective in key, small, slightly under-developed roles as Alan’s uncomprehending parents, the opinionated but inwardly-timid father Frank and the  genteel, religious mother Dora. Agutter, Harry Andrews, Eileen Atkins and Kate Reid don’t really have much to do at all, but they do it well.

The story’s so much all about Alan and Dysart, the others might as well just not be there. It’s all a bit of a psychological detective story as Dysart investigates the boy’s savage blinding of six horses with a metal spike in the stable. Uncovering the boy’s demons, Dysart of course has to face his own. These turn out to be more chilling – and ‘uncurable’ – than the boy’s.

Lumet goes the artificial route of letting Burton talk directly to camera in several of his long, key speeches. This works a treat, allowing us to peer into the agonised soul of Burton.

But understandably Lumet feels obliged to go for real horses instead of the play’s symbolic young men in horse masks and costumes. This makes the film more ‘real’ and urgently immediate but loses the theatrical poetic and mythic dimension. But then this is a film and not actually a record of a stage play. On set watching, Shaffer was horrified by the way Lumet directed the final scene in the stables, claiming he had made it like the shower scene in Psycho.

With Shaffer writing his own screenplay, the play is respected big time, though, and all the full essence of the story and its message are still here. And they come over loud and clear, and quite hauntingly, under Lumet’s loving care. Lumet was an expert in handling TV or stage transfers into cinematic experiences.

The young Firth is a wonderful actor, certainly in this role, though they only just caught him in time for the film (he’s 23 playing 17) before his looks changed so startlingly. He played Alan on Broadway from September 1974, and played the role in total more than 1000 times on stage. He had to beat off competition, with Burton’s help, to star in the film.

Equus officially opened at the Plymouth Theatre in New York on October 24, 1974, ran for 1209 performances and won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Play. Both the play and film broke conventions at the time for Firth’s full frontal nudity.

English playwright and screenwriter Sir Peter Shaffer, who won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Amadeus and was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Equus, died on 6 June 2016, aged 90.

Further controversy arose in 2007 when an English West End stage revival of the play cast Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, then the right age at 17, in the Alan Strang role and appeared naked. Richard Griffiths also starred as Dysart.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 445

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com