CERT: 15 / FORMAT: BLU-RAY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
Film versions of stage plays are generally divisive: how far from the original to stray? How beyond the playwright’s intention is the filmmaker’s? All that jazz. But Sidney Lumet’s 1977 version of Peter Shaffer’s hit 1973 National Theatre production is one of the most effective and powerful stage-to-screen translations because it takes confident risks and lands them. Stridently literalising a highly stylised stage production, with real horses instead of giant puppets, it’s a full-tilt psychodrama of a very English persuasion, despite the rather conspicuous Canadian location filming.
Teenage loner Alan Strang (Peter Firth) is committed to the care of psychologist Martin Dysart (Richard Burton) following an incident where the curly-haired lad blinds six horses with a sickle at a stable where he’s been working at weekends and getting the eye from Jenny Agutter. Alan isn’t the full shilling, of course, being the product of a fractured homelife in the ‘care’ of a religious zealot mum and a pussywhipped dad (Joan Plowright and Colin Blakely – utterly brilliant both). His self-created mode of ‘escape’ from all this is a bizarre worship of horses – which is how he ends up starkers above a stable with Jenny. But – drat it! – this most-‘70s of teenage sexual opportunities has him flapping like a wind-sock, so it’s time to take his abject failure out on those innocent nags downstairs in the most medieval way imaginable.
Lumet casts this to perfection. Firth, who created the role of Alan on stage, is astonishing, but this is all about Richard Burton in his last truly towering performance. Delving into Alan’s psyche and seeing a profound pattern to the boy’s outwardly crazed behaviour has a converse effect on Dysart’s fragile academic assumptions about ‘sanity’. Deep into late-phase alcoholism, the actor rages and broods with a controlled power you know is taking him over the top to a place few performers could, or perhaps should ever inhabit. It’s not a movie you’ll want to go back to very often, but because of Burton’s harrowing conviction, entreating us to come with him into the mouth of madness, you won’t need to: it’ll be under your skin and in your dreams.
This comprehensive 2-disc BFI re-release majors on director Sidney Lumet, with an 89-minute interview from 1981. Peter Firth is the subject of an excellent new 45-minute chinwag on his career and there’s a host of other equine goodies including some tangential but still-interesting short films although not (Firth fans rise up now and fight back!) any episodes of his breakout series, Here Come the Double Deckers. Best of all here is In from the Cold? A Portrait of Richard Burton, Tony Palmer’s sprawling 1988 feature-length documentary profiling the great man. To call it an ‘extra’ doesn’t do it justice.
