house of actors
by Douglas Messerli
Eugene O’Neill (screenplay, based on
his stage play), Sidney Lumet (director) Long
Day’s Journey into Night / 1962
After the stolid but somewhat
medicore production of O’Neill’s play Long
Day’s Journey into Night which I saw at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles,
I determined to revisit the 1962 film version, directed by Sidney Lumet.
I have often stated that I think this is one of the great
interpretations of the O’Neill drama, given the high standards of performance
by Katharine Hepburn, Sir Ralph Richardson, long-time O’Neill performer Jason
Robards, and the young, but quite capable, Dean Stockwell, whose performance
seemed to have been much stronger in this viewing than I originally recalled it
to be.
As the play continues, he comes more and more to regret his ugly, if
elegant utterances. And by the end of the film he has no longer choice but to
remain silent.
Jaime too, switches masks from moment to moment, best friend and
companion—even a brotherly lover—to self-loathing hater, a man who would
easily, like Jacob imagine killing his younger brother, Esau. After all, Edmund
has, so to speak, already gone to the “heathens,” traveling over the globe;
while Jaime, despite his hatred of his father and mother, has stayed on to tend
them. Nobody perhaps really loves a prodigal son.
Just like his father, Jaime switches from his cynicism to a sentimental
maudlin emotional response that comes from a career of acting, hating himself
so desperately that his is willing to save fat Violet from being fired by
joining her in a night a painful sexual release. In the end, Jaime is a ham
actor in his father’s tradition.
But Mary is the surprising star of this family drama, and the way
Hepburn portrays her, we recognize that she is the best actor of them all; even
from the very first scenes of the work, teasing her husband for his endless
snoring, and her portraying her own night wanderings as an omission of worry
for her younger son’s health, we perceive her immense capabilities of
portrayal, of lies, and deceit. Yes, she is “watching” them “watching her,” the
way any great lead knows she is being watched even as she is watching her
audience admiring her. And we grow quickly to perceive that Mary has shifted
her role from being the now recovered addict to a highly tragic heroine even
before the curtain has been raised.
Hepburn, in this film, is at her very finest: embracing her family
members at the very moment she slits their throats, offering up her saintly
presence while coquettishly playing a bitter whore. I now realize why Hepburn’s
performance has never left my mind. At every moment she mercurially shifts from
one person into another, loving and hating in the very same breath, blaming and
forgiving, imagining and forgetting. No one cannot fall in love with her and no
one with even a little bit of sanity cannot detest her. She is constantly on
fire, a beautiful flame not to be entrusted to mankind. She has made up a
person so costumed and perfect—her constant fear of her hair having fallen down
betraying her own highly artificed demeanor—that she is a kind of living
monster, all mask with, ultimately, no life within.
Mary’s world finally, particularly as Hepburn portrays it, is entirely
one of delusion. She literally lives in a past that never existed and plays out
that false reality, particularly when she attains the drugged transcendence—O’Neill’s
literal metaphor for the mental state of a grand actress—the way Sarah
Bernhardt or Eleanora Duse presumably performed their plays. Even Jaime
recognizes her as Ophelia.
There is no better actress in the world than Mary Tyrone, and her family
knows it. When she plays a role she is lost to the living, she is no longer a
mother, a wife. Hepburn has never had a better role.
And then there is Edmund, the observer, the poet, the would-be
playwright. Don’t get me wron
The only way Edmund can regain control is with the death of his dramatis
personae, which, in just a few years, he lost, enabling him to create his own
very different casts. His second beloved wife and one of his sons themselves
became addicts—clearly it is a family tradition. And wasn’t O’Neill himself a
kind of addict of and to the theater, disavowing his own daughter, Oona for
marrying another actor, Charlie Chaplin, and herself becoming an actor?
The Tyrone (O’Neill) house was a house of actors, and I believe Eugene,
although obviously depending on their kind for the rest of his life, never
really forgave their breed for their “false” portrayals of the world. Perhaps
that’s why he is so very specific in his dramatic instructions.
Orange, March 3, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017).
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