By Richard Winters
My Rating: 6 out of 10
4-Word Review: Teen blinds six horses.
Martin (Richard Burton) is a disillusioned, middle-aged psychiatrist who gets tasked with finding out why a 17-year-old boy named Alan (Peter Firth) blinded six horses one night in a stable with a sickle. At first Alan is uncooperative during their sessions and will not speak to him and instead sings out commercial jingles repeatedly, so Martin must go to Alan’s parents (Colin Blakely, Joan Plowright) in an effort to find some answers. It is here that he learns the mother is highly religious and taught her son that ‘God sees all’ particularly when it comes to sexual transgressions. Alan though has replaced God with his obsession with horses and idolizes them instead where he essentially makes them his ‘deity’. Martin now must try to break the boy away from this fanaticism in an effort to make him ‘normal’, but realizes when he does that the kid will cease to have passion and become like Martin himself who no longer has any emotions for anything including his own wife whom he no longer shares intimate relations.
Director Sidney Lumet has always had a penchant for turning plays into a movies and with some of them he’s had great success like with 12 Angry Men, but some of his other efforts did not fare as well. This project was met initially with a lot of apprehension, but overall Lumet’s directorial flair adds a lot and cinematically it works for the most part. The effort to get away from the staginess of the story by having several scenes done outdoors, like Martin having a discussion with his friend played by Eileen Atkins, about the case while raking leaves I felt really worked. Again, with cinema you have to have the characters doing something during the dialogue even if it’s some sort of chore as there’s nothing more stagnant than talking heads in a movie. The opening sequence done over the credits is well done too as it features Martin dealing with hostile patients hitting home the point of how burnt-out with his career he is without having it told to us and the white color schemes accentuates the tone one is most likely to see in hospitals.
The controversy came with the portrayal of the horses. In the play there were performed by muscular men inside a horse costume, but for the movie Lumet decided they needed to use real animals. This is okay until it comes to the scene where they get blinded. The play version only intimates the violent act, but with the movie you actually see the sickle go right into the horses’ eyes, which is so realistically done I don’t know how they did it without hurting the animal. This was way before computer effects, so just be warned if you’re an animal lover these scenes may be too graphic to bare and could easily take some viewers out of the story to the extent they may not be able to get back into and might just turn it off altogether.
The casting is a bit problematic. Both Burton and Firth played the roles in the stage version, but by this point Firth was no longer looking like a 17-year-old, he was in fact already 23. I admire his bravery to ride a horse in the nude in one of the movie’s more memorable moments, but he still resembles adult features physically taking away the innocence of the character and the shock of how someone so young, i.e. a teen. could commit such a vicious act. Burton too looks too worn out having spent this period of his career battling alcoholism. Some may say that this fit his role, but his presence seems at times almost lifeless and like he’s just walking through his part. The segments where he speaks directly to the camera become long-winded, stagey and aren’t effective.
The story itself may not work for everyone. It was inspired by a true event, which occurred in 1954, that playwright Peter Shaffer heard about, but did not actually investigate. Instead he wanted to come up with his own hypothesis on how someone could do what this character does without learning the real reason that motivated the actual culprit. Some may find the teen’s motivation here to be interpretive and revealing while others will blow-it-off as pseudo psychology and not able to fully buy into. For example certain viewers will find the scene where the father catches the boy kneeling in front of a picture in his bedroom of a horse and ‘worshipping it’ while wearing a make-shift harness to be quite disturbing though with others this same segment may elicit a bad case of the giggles instead.
My Rating: 6 out of 10
Released: October 14, 1977
Runtime: 2 Hour 17 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Sidney Lumet
Studio: United Artists
Available: DVD, Blu-ray
Scopophilia 