Equus (1977)
(On Cablet TV, August 2021) I’m a philistine when it comes to modern theatre, but even I was dimly aware of Equus’s reputation, largely because there seems to be a scandal whenever it’s revived, and that one of the last spats involved an attempt by Daniel Radcliffe to get away from his earlier teenage persona. If nothing else, the film adaptation would let me experience some of what the fuss was about, and help complete my filmography for both Sidney Lumet and Richard Burton. The opening is really quite good, as Burton sombrely frames the story in apocalyptic terms from the back of his darkened office. Then there’s an immediate narrative hook in how our psychologist protagonist (Burton, appropriately rumpled) is asked by an old friend to take on a most unusual case: a young man who abruptly blinded six horses. Getting to the heart of mystery will, obviously, take us deep in repressed perversion, Freudian symbolism and out-there psychological problems. The mystery is matched by the protagonist’s own descent into issues of his own. Like many theatrical adaptations, Equus is very talky and arguably too long for the film format. It also, crucially, literalizes many of the metaphors and stage tricks employed during theatrical productions that can’t bring real horses onstage. You can feel some of the symbolic power of the theatrical play leeched away by the realism of the film adaptation, but enough of it remains to get the point across. Burton got an Oscar nomination for the role, and so did Peter Firth for his intense performance as a troubled young man. There’s an interesting footnote in finding out that this very respectable film was a product of the infamous Tax Shelter years of Canadian cinema, in which many very bad movies (and a few surprisingly good ones) emerged from federal fiscal policy. As for Equus itself, it’s curiously respectable even after taking so many risks for a delicately evocative source material. It’s blunt in its psychological drama, but then again — it’s about a young man blinding horses in the throes of psychosexual trauma, so it has to go big.