If I’m Any Judge of Horse Flesh

I saw EQUUS as a teenager on the fuzzy black & white TV in my bedroom — but I think I maybe also recorded it on VHS, so I saw it more than once. But hadn’t looked at it for a long time.

I’ve said that Sidney Lumet, in regarding himself as a good all-rounder rather than an auteur of fixed identity, was short-changing himself as a specialist — his great films are New York crime films. But I have to add in his weird British period — I don’t know how to account for it, but I think possibly he realised that David V. Picker at United Artists’ UK branch was a very nice man to work for. “Here’s the money, we’ll see you at the premier,” was his philosophy. So Lumet made a bunch of films in Britain, or on foreign soil but about British subjects (THE HILL). THE OFFENCE, THE HILL, and THE DEADLY AFFAIR are still crime movies, though, as is EQUUS, a kind of detective story of psychology.

As a kid, the film helped get me interested in Lumet, and also Peter Shaffer, and I learned that PS’ brother had also written films I enjoyed, notably THE WICKER MAN. Probably I was particularly interested because of the sexual content, which is funny because EQUUS is mainly going to be sexy for you if you’re into boys or horses, but it does have a naked Jenny Agutter, and that was not to be sneezed at.

But I was aware of a powerful atmosphere of SOMETHING that wasn’t just sexual — there’s the shocking act of violence at the heart of the film, the mystery behind that, the labyrinth of the human mind, and also — the hushed tone between snatches of Richard Rodney Bennett’s sonorous score; the tricksy transitions between past and present, enabled by cunning staging and John Victor Smith’s graceful cutting; Richard Burton’s voice of honeyed gravel; Peter Firth’s physical acting (the way he opens doors only a crack and slides through sideways!); Oswald Morris’s cinematography, with its bold night shooting, an early variant on the X-Files approach (stick a huge blueish light up high and call it the moon — in this case, let’s let it cause camera flare also, because why not?) — these things combine and collide to create a genuinely poetic, mesmeric effect.

(Really sorry to discover today that John Victor Smith died when I wasn’t looking. Back when I interviewed Richard Lester, his collaborator on THE KNACK, HELP!, THE THREE MUSKETEERS etc, I was told he was ill and there would be no way to interview him, but now I see his suffering ended in 2019.)

Shaffer has boldly retained the psychologist’s monologues, or some of them — filmed in a single day because Burton had a bad back and disliked sitting at a desk. You could say he hasn’t finished rewriting his play as a screenplay. Certainly in AMADEUS he would make sure Salieri, in Dick Smith’s wonderful old age makeup, would have someone to talk to besides the camera. But I love the bold mash-up of forms here. Since this isn’t a play and the actors aren’t actually present, maybe you need an actor with an extra-large quantity of presence to fix the audience with a beady eye, in which case Burton is your man.

EQUUS seems banished to some neglected musty corner of the Lumet oeuvre, and Lumet’s oeuvre itself today feels slightly sidelined. But not only are Shaffer’s themes fundamental — he and his shrink-protag piece together the mosaic of events that form the young prisoner’s pathology/passion, but are powerless to explain WHY these fragments stuck together in this way — incidents that might have bounced harmlessly off the psychic hide of another person — but I think EQUUS is a fundamentally cinematic work of quiet brilliance, from the blocking of its dialogue scenes to the linking of scene to scene in visual and narrative terms, a work fundamental to Lumet’s movie-making.

EQUUS stars Alec Leamas; Joseph Andrews; Dr. Watson; Aunt Lucinda Spiderwick; R.S.M. Wilson; Eleanor of Aquitaine; Nurse Alex Price; Linda Loman; Erik Kriegler; and Junior Mammoth.