Equus (1977)

Directed by Sidney Lumet. Starring Richard Burton, Peter Firth, Joan Plowright, Colin Blakely, Eileen Atkins, Jenny Agutter, Harry Andrews, John Wyman. [R]

Intense film adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s acclaimed stage play of world-weary psychiatrist Burton reluctantly agreeing to treat a deeply disturbed stable boy (Firth) after he used a sickle to blind several horses. The allegory is laid on a little thick at times (never a comfortable bedfellow with psychoanalysis, Freudian or otherwise), and at least one conversation bears the mark of a writer inserting words into the doctor’s mouth—his periodic soliloquies are more effective and justifiable—but the material is otherwise absorbing, intelligent, and provocative. Burton and Firth are often stellar in their inherited roles, while director Lumet brings cinematic expansiveness and malleability to the stage transition…but adding a considerable degree of realism to the psychodrama comes at a cost, as it generates several of the film’s most glaring flaws, none more so than the nearly disastrous decision to show the blindings in graphic detail near the end of the film, which not only distorts the symbolic into the literal, but also erases much of the empathy the young man had gradually earned over the previous two hours. Earned Burton his seventh and final Oscar nomination—he never won.

71/100