Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962, Sidney Lumet)

76/100

Second viewing, last seen at Film Forum in 2008. I still remember being floored by the play when I first read it in college, even though nonstop recrimination isn't generally my stage-drama thing—every wound is so raw, and the portrait of a family helplessly watching its matriarch slip back into morphine addiction so minutely detailed, that you'd suspect the work to be painfully autobiographical even had O'Neill not locked it away until after his death. Lumet's efforts to make it cinematic despite the single-house setting can't match Mike Nichols' stunning Virginia Woolf adaptation (to be fair, Nichols shuttled the characters to a roadhouse for one scene for some visual variety), but he does expertly choreograph the actors in relation to the camera throughout, punctuating key moments with startling close-ups (including one split-second, low-angle, deliberately out-of-focus Edmund reaction that made me catch my breath—possibly should also credit legendary editor Ralph Rosenblum for that). And this is a strong cast, though Ralph Richardson playing Tyrone with his standard regal plumminess feels slightly off to me notwithstanding all the references to the man's acting career and love of Shakespeare. (Out of curiosity, I watched about 20 minutes of the 1986 Broadway production [as filmed for television], featuring Jack Lemmon, and his standard aggrieved testiness fit the role much more snugly, to my mind. Also damn Peter Gallagher played Edmund, three years before breaking out in movies via sex, lies, and Kevin Spacey played Jamie, six years before breaking out in movies via Glengarry.) Katharine Hepburn makes Mary's alternating horrified self-awareness and protective self-delusion truly heartbreaking, while Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell demonstrate what world-class scab-picking looks like (though I think Robards goes too big with Jamie's admittedly juicy Act Four "Watch out for me, kid, I'm gonna try to destroy you" speech). Noted with interest this time that O'Neill's the only credited writer, which means that whoever trimmed the play—and a fair bit was cut, as the full text takes well over three hours to perform, compared to the film's 170 minutes—chose to remain anonymous. Whoever it was did a creditable job, removing the opening lines about Mary's weight gain (nonsensical with Hepburn playing the part—one later reference remains, for some reason) and instead jumping forward to discussion of the foghorn, which eventually gets revealed as Mary's excuse for being awake in the middle of the night when in fact she was secretly shooting up. Basically: a masterpiece ably transferred.