Word: equus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...EQUUS...
...ever there was a play that has no business being a movie, Equus is it. This drama about a stableboy's crime of passion owed much of its three-year Broadway run to theatrical devices that cannot be reproduced on film. Strip the stagecraft away, and all that remains of Equus is 2% hours of talky debate about shopworn ideas. The poor play stumbles and falls before it can break from the gate...
...Equus is an even more tedious movie than it had to be. Usually an energetic film maker, Director Lumet (Network) seems to have thrown up his hands on this one. He shoots Shaffer's original stage script as is, to the point of having characters address monologues directly to the camera. The play's gory climax-the blinding of six horses-is rendered realistically, not mimed as it was onstage. Rather than enhance Equus, Lumet's fidelity to the text accentuates every flaw...
Some of those defects pertain to structure and language, but Equus' main drawback is its philosophical thrust. Like so many other trendy writers, from R.D. 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...
...that is why Shaffer stalls his inevitable denouement by padding the film's doctor-patient scenes with flashbacks that detail Alan's past. Despite a nude appearance by Jenny Agutter and cameo performances by such fine actors as Colin Blakely, Joan Plowright, Harry Andrews and Eileen Atkins, Equus' digressions are little more than excuses to fetch popcorn...