Watch Long Day's Journey Into Night For Free

Thanks for the memories!

Captivating movie !

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Mary (Katharine Hepburn) and James Tyrone (Ralph Richardson) live with their adult sons Jamie (Jason Robards) and Edmund (Dean Stockwell). Their idyllic upper middle class facade hides alcohol and drug addictions by every member of this dysfunctional loving family. They pick at each other over the course of a day.Director Sidney Lumet puts a camera to this Eugene O'Neill play. These are some of the best ever movie actors doing some compelling work. They are firing off lines like sharp shooters with long range rifles. Nobody is missing a beat. Everybody is brilliant. However, that doesn't make it a compelling cinematic experience. Lumet keeps the play intact which limits its appeal. It becomes more of an act of endurance to stay engage with this family. Its single-minded tone really pushes the audience. Some may find familiarity with this unrelenting onslaught. Others may find comfort in simply walking away.

While it's hard to argue that "Long Day's Journey Into Night" is not a great play, it's also a very difficult production to watch--at least for me. O'Neill himself intended that no one would ever see the play for 25 years--and he left this instruction CLEARLY in his will (which has nevertheless ignored and published just a few years after his death). It's obvious he was writing the piece more as a form of self-therapy--writing about the demons of his youth. The characters in the play, despite name changes, were his parents, his brother and himself--with all their MANY, MANY sick problems. Like the characters in the play, they were struggling with addiction, mental illness and LOTS of co-dependence.The problem for me was that I simply didn't like watching so much sickness and dysfunction. I was a social worker and psychotherapist for many years and saw too much over the years--so much it practically tore me to pieces. So, because of my background, I had a horrible time watching it because I just don't want to see what I know is true of many folks. Sure, the play rings very true--but I can't stand watching a show that makes "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" look like a comedy!! So, yes, it is insightful and raw...but too raw for me. I have seen so much illness and sadness and dysfunction that I started to find myself tuning it out after a while. Life is just too short for me to watch this. This is a rare case when I cannot give a film a bad score (it is brilliant in many ways) but I also hated it. Perhaps you will find it more watchable.By the way, if you do watch the film, one thing to note is that in an oddly ironic twist, having Katharine Hepburn play in this film was very strange. After all, she lived with Spencer Tracy for many years and he was, at times, an incredibly vicious and angry alcoholic and must have used some of the same crazy coping strategies that the folks used in this film to deal with addiction.

Having discovered O'Neills Mourning Becomes Electra a few months ago, I was interested in viewing this. Long Day just doesn't work in this era, because it's idea of drama is so limited; O'Neill shoe-horns dialogue/conversation into every opening. These characters have logorrhea. They talk everything out, then they break up into smaller groups and talk it out some more, then they move on to other groupings and talk it out some more, finally, as a finale, they talk it out some more. Words, words, words, words, words, words... After 30 minutes, you understand the psycho-dynamics and there's no real point in paying attention anymore. At one point this was controversial stuff, but any man on the street is now extremely familiar with the addictive personality and its resultant enabling, bullying & emotional manipulation. This family's problems are nor compelling. The movie is clearly going nowhere. In every scene they push each other buttons, and say awful things to each other; outbursts of no particular importance arrive about every 8 minutes.Mourning Becomes Electra has somewhere to go, and revelations that matter to the story. LDJiN hashes and rehashes the same points over and over. MBE is even more stagy and dated, but it has some actual shocks to deliver. Hepburn acting 'overwrought' is too familiar from her success. Her hop-head is hysterically inaccurate. She just comes downstairs cheerful and chatty after shooting up. Richardson is by far the worst here; a charter member of the British elocution club. He has an inexpressive stone face, with no perceptible emotional range.Strictly for people convinced that a string of outbursts is the height of drama. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is it's spiritual sibling (and also a slog to watch!). But The Little Foxes is more acid, with superior structure.

This is about as good a film as could be made from this material, which suffers from the usual O'Neill faults: it's ordinary, yet stilted; the tragedy seems inadequately transformed; and the language works only through its cumulative yield of tension and gloom. (A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, of roughly the same vintage, covers roughly the same ground-- but it's entertaining and funny and gives you lines you remember later. So does the brutal yet entertaining STAGE DOOR, for that matter, but then comedies don't count.) This is the sort of material that can make you feel proud to be an Irish barroom bore. The actors certainly do good work here, though Stockwell is a little weak in some of his scenes. Hepburn is very good, and this might be her best performance after ALICE ADAMS. Richardson is even better. And Robards comes through in the end. The young actress playing the domestic also makes an impression. The makers rethought the play in terms of a movie, with outdoor scenes and a nice piano score. They did their job and as a motion picture this is a success. It was shot in attractive widescreen B&W but the only version available seems to be a gritty Pan-and-Scan DVD transfer. Oddly...this seems somehow appropriate for O'Neill.