Equus dvd movie.|
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List Price: $14.98 Our Price: $12.99 You Save: $1.99 Features • Closed-captioned • Color • Dubbed • DVD-Video • Letterboxed • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 1977 DVD Release : 04 March, 2003 |
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Equus description A film adaptation of the famous play by Peter Shaffer, Equus stars Richard Burton (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1984) as Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist who takes on an unusual case: a young stable boy (Peter Firth, The Hunt for Red October) who, in a frenzy, has blinded six horses. Their sessions reveal that the boy has a quasi-religious fetish for horses and he rides them in the dead of night, experiencing an ecstasy unlike anything Dysart has ever known. Dysart begins to question: Is the pursuit of normalcy worth the loss of individual passions? Equus features a lot of hokum--its therapy scenes are absurd crescendos of revelation and insights. But its central question has substance, the direction is energetic, and the performances are powerful; Burton, handsome and haggard, brings a complex self-loathing to his role. Also featuring Jenny Agutter (Logan's Run) and Joan Plowright (Enchanted April). --Bret Fetzer |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Once it gets rolling... pow! |
| Equus (Sidney Lumet, 1977)
I have to admit that at first, I was kind of unimpressed with Equus. Richard Burton narrating the first dream bit... it just didn't work. It seemed overdone, the symbolism was way too naked, this just wasn't Peter Shaffer. No subtlety. No tact. For that matter, come to think of it, this wasn't Sidney Lumet, either. It was about ten minutes later, during the bit where Alan Strang (Peter Firth) is relaying his first experience with a horse, that the movie really fell into place. I think that has a great deal to do with Firth and not nearly as much to do with Burton, though he does grow into his role as the movie progresses. Firth, on the other hand, gives a powerful, terrifying performance from the get-go here. His mentally disturbed Strang is a perfect fit for Shaffer's celebrated meditation on the potential damage of the mixture of sex and religion. And while Equus, thanks in no small part to its slow, unworkable beginning, never quite reaches the heights of Dog Day Afternoon or Twelve Angry Men, but it remains a powerful and disturbing film, once it takes off. And take off it does. The cast entire do a very good job here. Joan Plowright is almost as distressing as Firth, despite being supposedly sane, while Colin Blakely plays her blustering, ineffectual husband excellently. Jenny Agutter (once again fulfilling her role as, in the immortal words of Jeff Murdock, "an advertisement for nudity!") makes a perfect love interest for Strang, teasing and coy, but willing to take the upper hand when necessary, while Burton, once he warms to the role, makes a fine psychotherapist. But what sets this apart is Lumet's interesting decision to keep Alan Strang at the same age in his flashbacks, rather than taking the more conventional choice of casting six-year-old and twelve-year-old actors to play earlier versions of the sixteen-year-old Strang; the scene I mentioned earlier, where Strang recounts his first experience with a horse, is just monumental. While it probably would be had they cast another character, by keeping Firth, the scene also gains an unsettling quality of imbalance; you know he's supposed to be six, but there he is, still his adult self. Amazing stuff. The subject matter, in today's political climate in both Britain and America, is probably deeply unpopular; if anything, that's even more a reason to get your hands on a copy of this at your earliest convenience and indulge yourself. **** |
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