Sidney Lumet  (1962)

In his review of Robert Dowling’s biography of Eugene O’Neill in the London Review of Books (5 February 2015), John Lahr takes Dowling to task for suggesting that, ‘Unlike most dramatic works, O’Neill’s plays are meant to be read in solitude as much as seen in a crowded theatre’.  Lahr asserts that, ‘No play is written to be read in solitude. A play is by definition a traffic plan for action; it exists to be performed’.  He does acknowledge, though, that, in the case of Long Day’s Journey into Night, his ‘masterpiece’, O’Neill ‘insisted in his will that it be published 25 years after his death but never performed’.  The play is autobiographical to a considerable degree.  As Christine Dymkowski explains in her introduction to the play text[1]:

‘O’Neill’s successive drafts show that he made the play conform more and more exactly to his family history.  For example, he originally planned to set it in 1907, but changed it to 1912, the same year he (like the play’s younger son) developed tuberculosis.  All the characters are the ages that their real-life counterparts, James, Ella, Jamie and Eugene, were in 1912.  Similarly, after several attempts at various names for the family, he settled for reality (although known as Ella, Mary Ellen was his mother’s given name).  Even the new surname of the family, Tyrone, is a reference to the territory of the early O’Neills in Ireland.  However, O’Neill made one significant departure in regard to names, exchanging his own with that of his dead brother Edmund.’

Dymkowski also explains that the play ‘[in] many ways … paints a gloomier picture than biography warrants’, except that Edmund ‘is a rather sanitised version’ of the author himself.  To what extent his use of family history (and names) explains O’Neill’s strictures concerning the publication and performance of Long Day’s Journey may still be arguable but I found that my reading of the text, immediately before seeing Sidney Lumet’s film, was strongly coloured by the knowledge that O’Neill was writing about those closest to him in his own youth and didn’t want the play produced.  Lengthy, prescriptive stage directions are a common feature of O’Neill’s work but one’s sense that the writer is setting in stone his characters and how actors read their lines is intensified by awareness that, in this case, they weren’t meant to acquire a life beyond the page.  In Long Day’s Journey, the ‘novelistic’ detail of O’Neill’s descriptions of his dramatis personae comes over as an expression of memory rather than of imagination.

In 1955, only two years after O’Neill’s death, Carla Monterey, his widow and sole executor of his literary estate, instructed Random House to publish the manuscript of Long Day’s Journey into Night.  When Random House, in deference to the author’s instructions (repeated as recently in 1951), refused to do so, Monterey rescinded its rights and reassigned them to Yale University Press.  From there on, things moved quickly.  February 1956 saw not only the play’s publication but also its first production, in Swedish, at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.  The play was directed by Bengt Ekerot (who, the following year, would be immortalised, in more ways than one, playing Death in The Seventh Seal).  The Stockholm staging was a great success and the first American production of Long Day’s Journey, directed by José Quintero, opened in New York in November 1956, with a cast including Fredric March (James), Florence Eldridge (Mary), Jason Robards Jr (Jamie) and Bradford Dillman (Edmund).  The play and its Broadway production won praise and prizes and Quintero also directed the first British production, which opened in Edinburgh before transferring to London, in 1958:  the cast comprised Anthony Quayle (James), Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies (Mary), Ian Bannen (James) and Alan Bates (Edmund).  Lumet’s screen version was first shown at Cannes in 1962, where its four main actors were all honoured (the Best Actor award was shared three ways), before opening in America in October of the same year.

I don’t recall ignoring an opportunity to see the film either on television or on a cinema screen in the more than forty years since I became aware of it, in the early 1970s, so I was excited by Long Day’s Journey‘s inclusion in BFI’s Katharine Hepburn season.  Things got off to an uncertain start.  It must have taken five minutes for the NFT1 lights to go down:  was this meant to mirror the movement of O’Neill’s story from sunny morning to dead of night – and remind the audience we were in for the long haul?  Maybe, but the introductions at BFI are so reliably clumsy that you couldn’t be sure.  (The inept, self-important front-of-house man was officiating – mike not working as usual.)  Once the film was underway, however, it was soon clear this was going to be something special.

In the course of the day and night within which the action takes place, Mary Tyrone relapses into her longstanding morphine addiction and the diagnosis of her younger son Edmund’s tuberculosis is confirmed.  The family quartet, as well as reacting to these particularly traumatic events, keeps gnawing at other persisting bones of contention – James’s tight-fistedness, Mary’s regret for her Catholic girlhood and resentment of the family doctor, Jamie’s heavy drinking.  The Tyrones go on and on about these things – the talk always spins back to them.  The repetitiveness gives the exchanges a nagging reality; the relentlessness creates a sense of the whole life story of a family being told through the events and conversations of these few hours.  Pauline Kael’s description of Long Day’s Journey into Night is close to the mark:

‘This portrait of the artist as an Irish-American has the worst American failings:  it’s obvious, sprawling, yet crabbed.  But if you respond at all, you may go all the way to exaltation.  Perhaps just because of its naked familiarity, its grinding, ludicrous wrestling with expressiveness, Journey is, at last, an American family classic; the usual embarrassments are transcended, and the family theme is raised to mythic heights.’

John Lahr in the LRB attributes O’Neill’s increasing misgivings about his work being performed to its dramatic limitations:

‘What makes his work so ‘readable’ on the page is exactly what makes so many of his plays leaden on the stage, where the eye can’t skip over the longueurs of the ‘barbershop harmony’ – [Mary] McCarthy’s phrase – of his construction.’

I found that the unhappy, wrenching subject matter and the inexorable reiteration made Long Day’s Journey a tough, often unrewarding read.  In contrast, the film is triumphantly ‘watchable’.  The writing credit is to O’Neill only but whoever edited the play text for the movie did a judicious job (cutting down, for example, the amount of poetry recited by various Tyrones – which is no great loss).  Sidney Lumet and the cinematographer, Boris Kaufman, present the action very intelligently.  There are a few occasions in the early stages when the camera closes in on a character, as they’re about to say something important, in what seemed to me an unnecessarily deliberate way.  At the very end, Lumet and Kaufman pull away from and above the family circle, seated at a table, as Mary continues to speak; for her last few lines (the last lines of the play), they suddenly revert to close-ups of each character in turn.   Although immediately impressive, the movement is distracting:  it draws attention to itself.  In between, though, the camerawork is unobtrusively excellent.  It’s fluid enough to prevent the film from becoming static; yet it reinforces the increasing claustrophobia of the piece.   The turning on and off of overhead lights in the main room is an important element of the nighttime scenes; Boris Kaufman’s lighting of these blends their realistic and symbolic aspects very successfully.  In the film’s equivalent to Act I, Lumet takes the action outside the house, onto the lawn of the Tyrones’ summer home and the harbour beyond.  This modest opening up made me apprehensive but it proves effective in the long term.  The suffocating tension within the house is intensified by one’s memory of the characters being able to breathe the air outside it.  By midnight, the images of the sunny morning in the garden seem paradisally remote.

André Previn’s score is both sensitive and tactful but it’s the actors who are crucial and who succeed in making the film a richer experience than the play text.   It’s debatable, though, whether this exposes as misconceived O’Neill’s insistence that Long Day’s Journey should not be performed – or refutes John Lahr’s (and Mary McCarthy’s) criticisms of O’Neill’s dramaturgy.  The only O’Neill I’ve seen on stage was A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Old Vic in 2006:  directed by Howard Davies and starring Kevin Spacey, Eve Best and Colm Meaney, the production was much praised but I found it – and the performances, except for Meaney’s – gruesomely forced and monotonous.  Lumet’s cast, whom he orchestrates skilfully, are something else:  they both serve the playwright and bring his writing to unexpectedly various, sometimes funny life.  This is all the more a pleasure when the text looks to make the actors’ task impossible.  Not only are the characters’ moods prescribed (so that the freedom to interpret seems to be severely reduced) – a mood change is prescribed what feels like, as you read the play, every second line.  The acting in this film is often great and I think it brings out the greatness of the text, but it left me wondering if the piece might be intolerable if the actors were anything less than great.

Whenever truth hits home, the eyes of Ralph Richardson, as James Tyrone, register the impact with penetrating ardency.  Years ago, James bought for himself a vehicle play that earned him plenty of money but stopped in its tracks his development as an actor.  In his offstage life too, he’s been doing the same character for too long.  Richardson achieves, often very well, the confluence between James’s histrionic spirit and his performance as a husband and father but his presence isn’t sufficiently dominating to explain the effect of his presence on his sons.  There’s a slackening of tension when he makes the running in a scene.  You can believe that Richardson’s James came from a family of poor Irish immigrants; it’s harder to believe that he was ever a matinee idol, even on stage.  Although I was absorbed by Richardson, I got to wondering who could have done the role better.  Laurence Olivier played it at the National Theatre in 1971.  He would surely have captured James’s passionate falsity and self-centredness, which elude Richardson.  I’m not sure, though, how well Olivier would have conveyed James’s less insincere aspects.

I didn’t decide who might have been completely right for James in 1962 – although I’d certainly liked to have seen Fredric March in the role.  By the end of the film, I was sure that, if it had been made twenty years later, Jason Robards would have been the man.  As the elder son Jamie, Robards, the only member of the cast to have played the role on stage, makes a very strong initial impression:  he’s more than able to illustrate Jamie’s inheritance of some of his father’s theatrical facility; he implies a tortured hollowness too.  Jamie isn’t a major factor in the following scenes that lead up to the men’s departure for town, where Edmund will visit Dr Hardy and be told the nature of his illness.  It’s when Jamie returns to the house, late at night and very drunk, that Robards’ performance becomes magnificent.  Jamie’s account of a visit that evening to a whorehouse is a superb fusion of witty self-loathing and compassionate honesty.  Robards is no less brilliant in Jamie’s disclosure to Edmund of his real feelings about his younger brother – the traumatic nature of whose birth saw the beginning of their mother’s morphine addiction.  Jamie’s admission that his own furious shame at being a failure has made him desperate for Edmund to be one too is perhaps the toughest revelation in the whole of Long Day’s Journey into Night:  at this pivotal in vino veritas moment, Jason Robards Jr[2] is frightenedly and frighteningly sober.

Dean Stockwell has, in one sense, the most difficult role because Edmund is the O’Neill alter ego and the writer O’Neill is concerned primarily with the influence on him of the variously powerful personalities of his parents and elder brother:  as a character, he’s essentially on the receiving end.  On the few occasions when O’Neill means Edmund to be the dramatic focus of a scene, Stockwell, in the exalted company of this cast, seems out of his depth.  He’s a very good listener, though, and he complements the more flamboyant performers effectively.  His Edmund – uniquely among the four Tyrones – is someone who might still be capable (though it’s odds against) of a stable, relatively happy life.  Jeanne Barr plays the family’s maid, Cathleen.  Her shrillness feels overdone on her first appearance but Barr does well in her main scene, with Katharine Hepburn’s Mary.

The play text enjoins Mary to make many high-speed transitions between anxious hypersensitivity and a mechanical, detached behaviour and vocal tone.  The following are pretty typical examples of O’Neill’s directions:

‘She pauses – then as if her words had been an evocation which called back happiness she changes in her whole manner and facial expression.  She looks younger.  There is a quality of an innocent convent girl about her, and she smiles shyly.’  

A page or so later:

‘She frowns and shakes her head automatically as if a fly had walked across her mind.  She suddenly loses all the girlish quality and is an ageing, cynically sad, embittered woman.’

The magic of Katharine Hepburn’s portrait of Mary is that the protean qualities of her face, voice, gesture and movement enable her to comply with the author’s instructions but to do it in ways that make her playing fresh and original.  It’s one thing for a stage actress to convince an audience of a character’s incarnating different ages; quite another for a screen actress to succeed in doing so under the close scrutiny of the camera.   Hepburn’s technical command is altogether a marvel.  (A simple example:  however much she drops her voice, she remains entirely audible.)  The repeated cryptic references in the script to Mary’s ‘medicine’ and what she’s up to ‘in the spare room’ raised a few laughs in the NFT1 audience and there’s no denying Long Day’s Journey into Night has its ridiculous side.  Katharine Hepburn’s achievement is to make the character she’s playing tragically ridiculous.  Her personal idiosyncrasies as a performer and her endless variety in this role accord with the relentless spirit of O’Neill’s play and illuminate the intersection between pretence, with a specifically theatrical flavour, and the capacity for true pain that lies at its heart.

9 March 2015

[1]  Nick Hern Books, 1991

[2]  This was still his performing name at the time.  I assume Robards dropped the ‘Jr’ when his father Jason died, in April 1963.