Long Day's Journey Into Night is a chore of a film, that has no point. A descent into madness, for almost three hours. Katharine's character says to James that she can tell when he is acting, isn't he suppose to be a great actor. I didn't hate it, but it didn't do anything. Converse, stand up argue sit down, back into conversation and repeat is basically what happens. What's the deal with all the organized big meals? Breakfast, lunch and dinner, that seems as absurd to me as all the dialogue. I thought Ralph Richardson gave the best performance.

Sidney Lumet cites his adaptation of Long Day's Journey Into Night as his proudest and most satisfying piece of work. It's easy to see why. This account of a single day in the life of a dysfunctional family offers him the same scale and subdued creativity as 12 Angry Men with half the characters and twice the runtime. It boasts powerhouse performances from titans of cinema - Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robarbs and Dean Stockwell deliver all-time worthy work. It's dense in dialogue and character, resulting in a whirlwind 3 hours that holds you in every moment. It's drenched in compelling drama, exploring identifiable regrets, vices, resentment and paranoia. It may be an ugly side to people, but it's truthful. Although it's been criticized for being too stagey, and although the acting may be theatrical, Lumet's stark poetic photography does half the emoting and compliments the character work perfectly. This is how it should be done.9/10

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.

A day in the life of Eugene O'Neill's spectacularly dysfunctional family would be an endurance test for any normal person. The morphine-addict mother, alcoholic older brother and skinflint father gather around the youngest son as he is about to leave for a sanitarium for consumption. They rationalize, get nostalgic about earlier times and think wistfully (not to mention self-deludingly) of the lives they might have led, while dissecting each others' faults as only family members can. The characters (and by now the audience) begin to dread the coming of night as the brother's drinking and the mother's drug use threaten to turn them by turns nasty and insane. Since the script is the star, the direction consists mostly of camera movement into and across and amongst the various pairings and groupings of the principles, which would seem a sound choice. The stage-bound claustrophobia which so commonly results in filmings of great plays is a virtue here, as the family members literally cannot get away from one another. They are held together by blood and co-dependency. Little actually happens and the action is kept to a minimum, but the dramatic fireworks keep things moving along.