United Artists
Directed by Sidney Lumet
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, MGM)
Ambitious, complex but ultimately unsatisfying adaptation of the Peter Shaffer play. Richard Burton is a psychologist assigned a particularly difficult case: a boy who has blinded six horses. At first the boy refuses to talk, only singing jingles from TV commercials. Burton investigates his home life, finding a deeply religious mother and suspicious father. Gaining the boy's trust and using psychological tricks like hypnosis he gets the boy to tell his story. At it's root, the boy's problem is a complex mix of religion and sex. These themes are difficult to put on film, though Burton and Lumet do their best. The flashback scenes are an easy out, and hurt more than help the film. Animal lovers will not want to see the graphic violence towards horses, fake or not, and these scenes could, and should, have been left out. Still, Burton has some of his best lines since Virginia Woolf and it is fascinating to watch him be transformed as much as his patient.
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