Long Day's Journey Into Night

Fine performances, but Lumet never figures out a way to either live within the stage confines or to open things up.

Zzzzz....

When it's good, it is goooooooood, but scenes without Hepburn drag endlessly. Three hours is also a bit too much for something this theatrically-grounded.

O'Neill's words sting when read aloud. It's very much in the vein of Lumet's other chamber dramas, where he tends to keep his camera more or less out of the way at first, but as it goes on it becomes more expressionistic. There's a foghorn which tolls incessantly in the last act, and the small and distant sound carries so much weight because Lumet can play his hand so subtly. It's nice to see the often underused Elliot Gould and Dean Stockwell given so much screentime.

85.00

84.500

A very strong adaptation by Lumet of the famous Eugene O'Neill play. Richardson and Stockwell hold their own, but the film belongs to Hepburn (whose somewhat extreme acting style fits the role perfectly) and, in particular, to Robards who is simply magnificent here.

Except for "Strip Search" this may be the poorest film by Lumet. You can tell it's adapted from a play thanks to the heavy focus on dialogue. The trouble is, it's not a very good play. O'Neill's idea of drama is the gradual outing of the skeletons from the closet of his white-collar family, but the omnipresent dialogue is flat and unconvincing, making Long Day's Journey a dull and tedious one.

It must be hard to adapt a well-known stage production into a film such that the end result feels natural. In this case, Lumet seems determined to use the camera to escape the "watching from the audience" feeling, but I just felt like an unruly spectator staggering around the stage.

Unlike a lot of American films based on stage plays, this adaptation is absolutely filmic owing to a turning-point undertaking by director of photography Boris Kaufman, whose consummate camera movements and lighting focus our attention on every telling action and word of dialogue. Flaunting four overwhelming performances (five if you count the fleeting maid), this is ensemble acting at its very best.