Equus

Richard Burton plays a psychiatrist who attempts to discover why young Peter Firth has taken to mutilating live horses. In probing Firth's psyche, Burton discovers that the source of the boy's obsession is his mother, Joan Plowright, who has raised Firth with a convoluted set of values. Even as he ...more

In Sidney Lumet's cinematic adaptation of Peter Shaffer's psychological drama Equus, Richard Burton must portray a psychiatrist who has lost faith in himself. He is a hollowed-out man in a stultifying marriage who no longer believes that his work with severely troubled teenagers does any good whatsoever. He is savvy enough to understand what is happening to him, but is still unable to rouse himself out of his malaise. Burton inhabits this character with such sadness and such self-directed anger ...more