Peter Shaffer's theatrical shocker about an emotionally dry psychiatrist, also a stuffy classicist with a taste for the dead gods of ancient Greece, who becomes frightfully envious of a teenage patient's brief moments of passionate spiritual oneness with horses while he rides them naked under the moonlight. Sidney Lumet shapes the play into mountainous blocks of tense, painful acting: chiefly, Richard Burton gazing tormentedly into the camera and doing artful dramatic readings, and the smooth-faced Peter Firth, as the boy, padding around in baby steps as though he's in shackles. Jenny Agutter, as the only major character seen only in flashback, is the only one to act life-size. There's some exciting, sensual horse imagery, now and then, to liven up the carefully dull brown color scheme. The climactic blinding of the horses is depicted graphically, gruesomely, but also incredibly — the distraught boy swinging a sickle with a pinpoint accuracy into the eyeballs of six panicked horses. (1977) — Duncan Shepherd
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