Northern gothic

Katharine Hepburn has been TCM's Star of the Month this month, which gave me the chance to record one or two of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One of these was the adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night.

The play deals with the Tyrone family, and one day in their life in the summer of 1912. The story is loosely based on Eugene O'Neill's own family, and set at a time when he would have been in his mid 20s. Here, that character is the younger brother Edmund, played by Dean Stockwell. Edmund has spent his adult life trying to escape the long shadow of his family, mostly doing so by becoming a merchant marine. He's recently returned home to the family's summer place in Connecticut, and there's some worry that his persistent cough is in fact tuberculosis, often referred to in those days as consumption.

Hepburn plays Edmund's mother Mary; she doesn't want to hear of her son having consumption. Understanding this and trying to protect Mary is dad James Sr. (Ralph Richardson). He was a stage actor who's reaching the age where he should retire and try to live off his savings. Not as though an actor can have that much savings, so he's always trying to save a few dollars wherever he can. This is another source of rancor between various pairs of family members, as it also leads to Dad's distrust of doctors that may have consequences for Edmund, and definitely already did for Mary.

Part of Mary's backstory is that she had a difficult pregnancy with Edmund and the postpartum issues nearly killed her; as a result she was prescribed morphine. The only thing is that she got herself addicted to the morphine, and the rest of the family is dancing around that fact trying to keep her off the drug while she thinks (not entirely wrongly) that the rest of the family is spying on her.

And then there's elder brother Jamie (Jason Robards), who is enough older than Edmund that he's had a much more mature look at the breakdown of the family and how each parent's different view of the two sons has also caused all sorts of problems with the brothers' relationships with their parents along with the two brothers' relationship with each other. So there's a lot of pent-up resentment here and opportunity for them finally to get all that resentment off their chests.

And boy do they spend a lot of time getting that resentment off their chests. They talk, and talk and talk some more, and when they're done talking, well, they're never done talking and getting to -- and going past -- the point of no longer caring whether they piss off the rest of the family by revealing uncomfortable truths.

It's that talkiness -- and director Sidney Lumet decidedly felt that the original play should be edited as little as possible for the movie -- that may make the movie a tough slog for many viewers. It goes on for well over two and a half hours, and the characters are, like the ones in Sweetie, not particularly sympathetic. If you know that going in, and you're up for a movie that's more of a master-class in acting, then you'll probably highly enjoy this adaptation of Long Day's Journey Into Night. If that's not your thing, then consider this review a warning.