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OH HOLY MARY According to most critics, Katharine Hepburn reached the height of her career as drug addicted Mary in Sidney Lumet’s 1962 version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. True, she isn’t the definition of bad, yet, except for the character’s affliction, there’s nothing new in the long-familiar routine of the idiosyncratic and affectations. The haughty Hepburn tics & tricks have congealed as artifact; the same old anger, quivers, gazes, wide smiles, the quick hope-you-didn’t-catch-those glances at the camera, the incessant fiddling with her hair have become mechanism extraordinare. She’s a banner of inaccessibility, producing the inevitable waving of blockades preventing belief in character, especially as mother. (If there’s such a thing as transmission of movie genetics, only twice did she pass them on: Suddenly, Last Summer and The Lion in Winter.) And yes, stop the show as Mary she does: so tightly wound as the chatterbox she becomes a remedy for sleeplessness. This isn’t altogether her fault: O’Neill as brooding giant wrote an autobiographical chore customarily too long and talky; he had little interest in or compassion for the tolerances of audiences, expecting them to have the patience to sit through hours of his exculpating babble on wrenching familial dysfunction. (Additional examples: Mourning Becomes Electra and Strange Interlude, both turning into intellectualized soap.) As directed by Lumet, the movie Long Day’s Journey into Night is still irremediably theatre—an unrelenting downer during which you feel the heavy glazes of apathy and monotony pouring over you and desperately want to escape. The New York run started out as a roadshow engagement (roll over AD at bottom left); after quickly exhausting all the masochists, it went “popular prices.” The frequent use of the then-rarely-heard “God damn” didn’t much bother the Legion of Decency or censors in major cities because the prestige of O’Neill’s name was enough to scare the mobs away. Whatever you call this—perhaps a forerunner to the American Film Theatre experiement in the 70s—it has fierce partisans, including the director who fiercely defends his method in the informative Making Movies. Hepburn, Sir Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, Jr. and Dean Stockwell were honored by the Cannes jury with a special prize for ensemble acting. (I’d change ensemble to resembling.) Photographed by Boris Kaufman; edited by Ralph Rosenblum; production design by Richard Sylbert. Origianl running time 174 mins. ROLL OVER IMAGE & AD
Text COPYRIGHT © 2000 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved. |
