The Right Hand Man

Original post date: 24 May 1987
Rating: ✭✰✰✰

For the second time in this film festival, we get to see a couple of horses getting it on, and once again it bodes ill for the poor people who have to watch this and the rest of the movie. Rupert Everett (the pretty actor who starred in Another Country and Dance with a Stranger and has been dubbed by the deputy festival director as Pouty Lips) plays Lord Harry, a horse-loving scion and sole heir to an aristocratic Australian family. Unfortunately, Harry has diabetes and when he faints while racing in a carriage, there is an accident that kills his father and injures his arm, which ends up having to be amputated (on-screen; ugh!). But Harry is still keen on driving his horses, and his incredible bitch of a mother still wants an heir, so he hires Ned, a handsome, healthy young man to do all those physical things that Harry can no longer manage. If that made you think something dirty, don’t feel bad. The makers of this film are way ahead of you. Harry is in love with the doctor’s daughter and she with him. She has a very medical and scientific bent. When a pet monkey arrives severely damaged in shipping, she wastes few tears before setting about dissecting it. She, Harry, and Ned enter into some sort of weird ménage á trois (or ménage á cinq, if you are counting the arms involved). This is one of the few movies that got hissed at the end, and the only one I can remember where a festival official apologized to the audience afterward. The moral: beware of movies in this festival that deal with the intimate affairs of horses.

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