Word: dysart
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...indeed, seem confined as most of the action takes place on a black platform surrounded by wooden railing and decorated only with three hard benches. The platform mostly serves as the stable where 17-year-old Alan Strang blinded six horses and as the claustrophobic office of Dr. Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist who must "cure" Alan. The performers move in a seemingly eternal sunset--the muted orange glow of Dan Scherlis' and Alexis Layton's gorgeous lighting design--dissolving only when we venture into Alan's tortured memory, where he relives his psychotic pains and pleasures in an evilly beautiful...
...none of the outrageous improvisation that marks Sellers' acting when he feels a project is going badly. "I was amazed at the discretion with which he handled the part," says Co-Star Melvyn Douglas. "Never was there a suggestion of having overblown any sense of it." Adds Richard Dysart, who played a doctor: "The texture of that man's work! He gave Hal Ashby two or three different characters?not that varied, but different. I began to see that there was a through line for each, that they were consistent." Ashby thus had not just alternate scene readings...
...understanding the extraordinary success of Shaffer's work (he also is responsible for the film's screenplay) lies in the fundamental issues of existence raised by Dysart's mental meanderings. In his search to uncover the sources of Strang's obsession, Dysart observes that "a child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave." But the psychiatrist can only throw up his hands with an admission of resigned incomprehension: "Why those moments of experience are particularly magnified no one can say." From one perspective, the psychiatrist's reflections seem a recognition of the paradox...
...darkest of nights and a blinding brilliance of light. But the segment that qualifies as Lumet's tour de force lies elsewhere, in the scene showing Strang's brutal rampage through a stable--sparked by his failure to make love to young girl--that eventually leads him to Dysart's couch. After he has brusquely dismissed the girl out of frustration and shame, the unclothed Strang stands fully erect in the loft of the stable, hurling himself into the now familiar rite of horse adulation. Suffused with ambers and golds, the shot evokes a tinted Renaissance fresco, with the rapturous...
...challenge he set himself, Lumet deserves pardon for a few tactical mistakes. He has come up with a film sufficiently slick and commercial to avoid the stigma of a pseudo-Bergman exploration of the soul, yet without cheapening the gravity of the questions that arise from the struggle between Dysart and his young patient. Much of the credit for this achievement must of course go to Shaffer's extraordinary script. But such a nod to the playwright in no way lessens the triumph of the man behind the camera...