Long Day's Journey Into Night [DVD] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

This painfully autobiographical play is set on the long day and night in 1912 when the Tyrone family deals the news that young Edmund (Dean Stockwell) has tuberculosis. The tragedy is compounded by the rest of the family: a father (Ralph Richardson) who is a miser, a brother (Jason Robards, Jr., repeating his stage performance) who finds solace in drink, and a mother who retreats into her addiction to morphine before the night is over. Writing about his own family, O'Neill not only changed their last names to Tyrone but also switched Eugene with Edmund, the name of the infant brother who died. After watching this heartbreakingly painful story you know why the playwright wanted it tucked away until he was long gone.

Hepburn received her ninth Oscar nomination for her role as Mary Tyrone (the award went to Anne Bancroft for "The Miracle Worker"), and the four actors shared the acting award for the Cannes Film Festival along with the principals of "A Taste of Hone" (no clue how they came to that strange pairing). The almost 3-hour film is the complete O'Neill script (the key selling point for Hepburn in taking the role) and was shot by director Sidney Lumet in sequence in 37 days after the cast rehearsed for three weeks. The music score is by Andre Previn and Boris Kaufman was the cinematographer of this black and white film. O'Neill is enjoying something of a revival thanks to Kevin Spacey in "The Iceman Cometh" on Broadway, but when it comes to film this is far and away the best representation of his work. Given that he wrote extremely long plays about the early part of the last century, it is likely we will never see a greater film version of O'Neill than "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

Interesting background tidbit: Hepburn tried to talk Spencer Tracy into taking the role of the father. Tracy, who was already in failing health, turned it down, claiming it was a question of salary (Hepburn received only $25,000 for her part). Some of Tracy's biographers, wondering how one of the greatest actors of the century would have done with one of the greatest plays, have suggested that Tracy was intimidated by the role. Still, it is hard not to fantasize about the "Long Day's Journey Into Night" as a Tracy-Hepburn vehicle.

Eugene O'Neill's play was only a slightly dramatized account of his own family life when he was a kid. The play, of which Lumet's TV film is a very loyal depiction, is pretty predictable in the way it stages its climaxes and obvious in its carefully sketched opposites, but it has a basic, driven energy that holds up even now.

So, was Katharine Hepburn ever better than in the virtuoso part as Mary Tyrone? She has done movies that are far better, but was she herself ever more convincing? You are never allowed to forget that this is play-acting, not a slice of real life, but it is still quite riveting to watch her, and I am overawed at her willingness to take risks. She and her three co-stars all were awarded the year's acting awards at Cannes, but the years haven't been kind to Ralph Richardson's outrageously histrionic Tyrone, far more superficial and complacent than even Tyrone the Ham himself would have played it.

The studio did not do a good job with their alleged digital restoration of 'Long Day's Journey'. Frankly, the DVD looks awful, scratchy and blurry.