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.

The Man who was Serpico

SERPICO in 4K at the Glasgow Film Theatre where a cup of coffee apparently costs more than five pounds.

I’d never seen SERPICO properly — it’s one of very few major Sidney Lumet films I had yet to see. And it IS major — a terrific piece of work. The only thing that didn’t work for me is the music — Mikis Theodorakis’ score is attractive, but the film doesn’t need it. I feel that if Lumet had a weakness, it was in the use of music. He’s a bit defensive about this in his book, Making Movies — he says the only time he wanted the audience to be aware of the score was in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. But I was aware of it in THE ANDERSON TAPES and THE DEADLY AFFAIR, and I what I was aware of was not liking it, not thinking it worked. And that’s Quincy Jones, who we know is an excellent film composer among his other many talents. And the use of Ruben Blades’ songs in Q&A was disastrous, I thought. GARBO TALKS, awful. In most of the other cases it must have worked, though, because I don’t remember it.

SERPICO being a realistic type film, music is always going to be difficult because non-diegetic music is not capable usually of making things more realistic. And SERPICO is very tight and compact and talk-driven, and the scenes form a sort of mosaic (Dede Allen cut it, beautifully), lots of little fragments of time arranged into a meaningful pattern, where the meaning of a scene emerges not necessarily while you’re looking at it, but later, in relation to the surrounding scenes. The music tended to flow across those sharp cuts in a way that slightly blurred their impact.

But Allen, Lumet, and screenwriters Waldo Salt (MIDNIGHT COWBOY) and Norman Wexler (JOE) adapting Peter Maas’ factual book, do the business. I only just learned that Wexler was once arrested for threatening to kill Nixon in a moment of bipolar extremis. Not that that would necessarily have to be a sign of madness.

Al Pacino is terrific, and he’s surrounded by such a brilliant supporting cast — all perfectly in tune with the naturalistic, grubby vibe: John Randolph, Tony Roberts, Kenneth McMillan, Judd Hirsch, M. Emmett Walsh and an uncredited F. Murray Abraham. The film with both F. *and* M.

Funny how I saw GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD the same day, which had an uncredited Robert Shaw as “the Oracle.” But F. Murray may be the MOST uncredited major actor ever, and I’m not sure why he chooses this: he has no credit, as I recall, in MIMIC, nor in BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES — OK, I can sort of understand that one — I just typed BINFIRE which must have been Freudian — but he’s one of the best things in it — he gets the required tone, and a few of the very few laughs.

Great location work — the paint just boiling off the walls. The story has the logic of a nightmare, but is true — a cop doesn’t want to go on the take, but everyone else is doing it, and this causes them to distrust him. They’re angry at him and they blame him for making them feel bad about themselves, I think (they’re not very bright, some of them). And of course they can’t trust anyone who’s not as implicated as they are: what is to stop him giving them away if he’s not guilty too? And with the brilliant malice of the stupid, every time he shows them THEY’RE in the wrong, they hate him more.

(GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday tells the same story, in a way, but reversed. A man infiltrates a criminal conspiracy, but as he moves up the ladder, each conspirator he meets is a double agent like himself. It becomes obvious early on what the game is, and yet the book somehow sustains interest and is continuously funny despite only having one joke. SERPICO is less mysterious — it’s intuitively obvious that as Serpico keeps appealing to higher powers and discovering that each successive layer of the onion is as rotten as the last, the horror will mount. The danger of monotony is mostly illusionary because the stakes keep going up, but the movie has solutions to the danger anyway, including Serpico’s amusing costume changes, a deadpan source of humour that doesn’t have to be referred to after a while, and can just work as tonal counterpoint to the life-and-death stuff.)

The script is online and it’s a nice document — it’s interesting to see how much a script can contribute, and in places how little. The film begins with white credits on black. Hard cuts. A siren slowly getting louder. Then the up-close sound of laboured breathing. Acoustically this is an abstract distortion of reality — if we’re in the ambulance, maybe inside Pacino’s head or very close to it, why does the siren start off quiet/distant and then grow louder before we hear him? Maybe it’s subjective — we’re emerging from the fog of unconsciousness with a small-calibre bullet in our face.

Only then do we get the script’s beginning, with the attention-grabbing lines:

DESK SERGEANT: Jesus Christ! Guess who got shot? (pauses) Serpico.

PLAINCLOTHESMAN: You think a cop did it?

DESK SERGEANT: I know six cops said they’d like to.

Also: Peter Dinklage has a major role in Lumet’s FIND ME GUILTY (a movie in which Rudy Giuliani is the offscreen villain, like Sauron). And there’s another small actor in this one. Does this mean anything? Lumet said he cast Dinklage because his film was mostly set in one courtroom (no little people in TWELVE ANGRY MEN though, unless John Fiedler counts). Do we have the beginning of a thesis here? The Role of the Small Person in the Films of Sidney Lumet?

SERPICO stars Jimmy Hoffa; Arthur Hamilton; Erie Kid; Captain Miles Browning; Warren LaSalle; Scalfoni – Apartment Superintendent; Lt. Hal Brubaker; Angry Miner; Private Detective Loren Visser; Antonio Salieri; Uncle Boris ; Sal Boca; and Baron Harkonnen.

King of the Hill

JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT is a Sidney Lumet I’d never seen — from 1980 — Fiona got very excited when she learned it was written by Jan Presson Allen (MARNIE, CABARET) from her own novel. I could never understand why writers should be forbidden from writing their own movie adaptations, providing they understand screenwriting. Allen learned from Hitchcock.

Alan King plays a tycoon and Ali McGraw is his mistress and business protegé. This could almost have been a 30s romantic comedy, except it’s a little TOO sophisticated even for that decade — McGraw disrobes and King uses the “cunt” word in front of Myrna Loy. (Water off a duck’s back to our Myrna. Fiona was also very excited about Myrna being in it.) Ultimately, Fiona kind of drifted away from the movie, not really liking the characters and put off by the score, which is indeed kind of diabolical. I was cheered to see that composer Charles Strouse had a distinguished career, so that this can be dismissed as a blip.

(In his terrific book, Making Movies, Lumet is a little defensive about his work with composers, saying that MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS was the only movie where he wanted us to notice the score, and we did, and it was Oscar-nominated. But he did get it wrong from time to time. GARBO TALKS is a charming comedy rendered unwatchable by its music — same problem as JYMWYW — playing the comedy; Quincy Jones contributed odd and inappropriate scores to THE DEADLY AFFAIR and THE ANDERSON TAPES, though elsewhere he’s been a versatile and sensitive accompanist. Q&A has a score by Ruben Blades that might work extremely well if it didn’t have bloody lyrics, which render the whole thing jumbled and distracting. And then there’s THE WIZ.)

The other thing that makes the movie modern is Alan King, who isn’t an old-fashioned movie star, and commits to playing a rather loathsome character in a way that no old-school star would. Cary Grant could have done the same stuff, but with a twinkle. King’s barefaced aggression and vindictiveness do make it awfully hard to care about the central relationship — I rooted for McGraw when she violently assaults King in Bergdorf Goodman, but not when she made up afterwards. Still, I wouldn’t want to lose any of the bad behaviour — the portrayal of this all-powerful businessman as a peevish child (with added lechery) has a frankness that’s appealing.

Also with: a painfully young Peter Weller, a painfully old Keenan Wynn (lovely), and Tony Roberts being gay.

This is Loy’s last movie, and she’s great in it as a hyper-efficient P.A. who has no illusions about the kind of man she works for, and manages to like him without looking the other way — up to a point. This could theoretically have run in The Late Films Blogathon, but I decided just to use it as a reminder. Dec 1st-7th. All are welcome!