Word: dysart
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...opening portions of Equus unveil the two recurring images that will dominate the film's visual dimension: a close-up of the doubt-ridden psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Burton) musing about the complex case of his teenage patient Alan Strang (Firth), and a darkness-clothed scene of a naked Strang standing beside a horse, the object of his near psychotic obsession. Lumet fills his lens with Dysart's ruminating face, punctuating the narrative with the Shakespearean soliloquies of the confused shrink. At times, these infrequent monologues border on the histrionic, as Burton casts off the necessary restraint of a film star...
...That boy has known a passion more ferocious than any I have ever known throughout my life, and I envy him for it," Dysart declares to the audience, making an eloquent summary of the dilemma that the psychiatrist perceives as he approaches Strang's case. In the figure of the disturbed boy, Dysart has run up against a patient who matches his own forceful character, yet can identify Dysart's very unique weaknesses with all the insight of one of the psychiatrist's professional colleagues. Strang senses the sexual and emotional impotence of his putative healer, using his instinctive acumen...
...Laing to Ken Kesey, Shaffer wonders whether madness may be a greater virtue than sanity in a sterile modern world. In Equus, madness is personified by Alan Strang (Peter Firth), a pretty, blond youth whose sexual desire for horses drives him to blind them; sanity takes the form of Dysart (Richard Burton), a repressed psychiatrist charged with curing Alan of his antisocial passion. In this confrontation between a virile equussexual and an impotent prune, can there be any doubt as to who will emerge the moral victor...
...exchanges between Equus 'antagonists are scarcely more exciting. Firth's performance, seemingly so natural in a theater, looks artificial in closeup. Burton provides a curiously bland Dysart who lacks the high-pitched emotional constipation that both Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen brought to stage productions. Lumet tries to save the day by flooding Burton's speeches with melodramatic lighting and music, but no such makeshift remedy can cure Equus of its congenital limp. - Frank Rich
...films and with Michael York in last year's Hollywood science-fiction fantasy Logan's Run. Now comes Equus, Sidney Lumet's film of the long-running Broadway psychodrama. Jenny, 24, plays a pert stablehand who tries to seduce the troubled young patient of Psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Richard Burton). In the film, as on Broadway, that scene is played au naturel, which doesn't bother Jenny, since she considers it "necessary for the story." Says she: "As soon as you start covering up, as soon as you start avoiding the nakedness, it becomes a bit naughty...