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.
Her career has been one of odd and wayward choices – but seldom, if ever, a dull or a lazy one. So news that Nicole was teaming up with globe-trotting megalomaniac auteur Werner Herzog was something of a cinephile wet dream. She has the blonde hair and the vaguely manic blue eyes to become a female Klaus Kinski, who – under Herzog’s guidance – went mad in exotic locations in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). The role chosen was Gertrude Bell, a sort of female Lawrence of Arabia who explored and mapped the Middle East in the early 20th century and drew up the borders of present-day Syria and Iraq. Given that both countries are in a state of ongoing meltdown – beset by ethnic, religious and political wars – Bell now looks like a meddlesome amateur of the very worst kind. But however politically ill-timed it might be, Queen of the Desert (2015) had the potential to be a full-blown exercise in movie madness.
It begins promisingly enough at an opulent stately home in England’s green and pleasant land. The young Gertrude is just down from Oxford and railing against her life as an upper-class debutante. There is nothing new in a movie asking us to sympathise with the woes – real or imagined – of absurdly entitled and over-privileged folk. Our disquiet is focused squarely on Nicole or, rather, on the ever-changing work-in-progress that is Nicole’s face. She is meant to be in her early twenties but looks at least forty. Her features have the glazed and plumped-up look of the 45-year-old Lana Turner, cast as a virginal bride in the opening scenes of Madame X (1966). We must take it on faith that the still-lovely Jenny Agutter is playing her mother. She looks more like a wise and well-bred elder sister who has opted for the natural look.
Soon enough, her long-suffering parents grow fed up with her whining and pack her off to Tehran – where a distant cousin is head of the British Legation. Surely now is her chance to open herself wide to the mysteries of the Orient. Instead, she opens herself wide to a dashing junior diplomat played by James Franco. The kindest thing one can say is that his English accent is only slightly less convincing than Robert Redford’s in Out of Africa (1985). (Redford, famously, did not attempt an accent at all.) He climbs with Gertrude to the top of one of the mythic Towers of Silence, where the Zoroastrians leave their dead to be eaten by vultures. The lone vulture in residence takes unkindly to their presence. Jutting out its neck, it emits a loud squawk at the camera. This is by far the most expressive piece of acting we have witnessed so far. The intruding lovers retreat and consummate their passion elsewhere.
Inexplicably, Gertrude’s parents baulk at this chance to get rid of her. It seems her suitor is socially déclassé and given to gambling. She goes home to England to nag them into changing their minds. Some months pass and Franco stages an abrupt exit by drowning himself in a river. Despairing of ever finding another man whose acting is worse than hers, Gertrude resolves to spend her life roaming the Middle East in his memory. She becomes – so the closing credits tell us – the leading expert of her day on Bedouin tribes and their culture. On screen, she displays all the cultural acclimitisation of Dorothy in her travels through the Land of Oz. Entire decades slip by with Nicole looking bored on top of a camel or wandering through an Arabian souk, in wafting white draperies on loan from Marlene Dietrich in The Garden of Allah (1936). The desert sands blow very prettily indeed. But whoever suspected that a trek lasting several months, through places quite devoid of human habitation, could possibly be this dull?!
The dramatic high point of Queen of the Desert is not hard to pinpoint. It happened when our cat Toby found a cork that had rolled off the table during dinner. He rolled it deftly around the room, with the flair of a feline Lionel Messi. I’m honestly not sure what country Gertrude was meant to be in at that point. The film was shot on location in Morocco and Jordan – where Nicole, as any reader of Hello! will tell you, is a close personal friend of Queen Rania. There is a tentative – and even more tedious – affair with a second British diplomat (Damian Lewis) and an encounter with T E Lawrence, played as a cameo role by Robert Pattison of Twilight. In all fairness, his performance is no better than anyone else’s. But it is, at least, enthusiastically and energetically bad. He is a refreshing contrast to Nicole, who seeks to absolve herself of bad acting by not acting at all. Or is she just resting her facial muscles for their next encounter with the surgeon’s knife?
I realise I have said nothing at all about Queen of the Desert’s place in the wilfully eccentric oeuvre of Werner Herzog. There is, frankly, no indication that Herzog or anyone else directed this movie. Still, I suppose somebody must have.
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