Long Day's Journey into Night
(1962)
Wow. For the first hour-plus of this nearly three-hour film I was appalled by Katharine Hepburn's grotesque overacting as Mary Tyrone. Ralph Richardson's too, as James--but at least he had the excuse of playing a ham actor who can't stop being a ham even off the stage. Mary is a Catholic-school girl-become-hophead who has no reason to be so large, but she is, for an hour, seventy, maybe eight minutes. And then.
And then she plays a high-on-morphine scene with first the maid and then James that is just mind-blowingly heart-crushing--maybe fifteen minutes, maybe less . . . and then (contrary to the play) she completely disappears until a short final scene.
But how in the hell could she be so embarrassingly bad for so long, then suddenly flip a switch into magnificence? Does the director, Sidney Lumet, get the blame? The credit? It's a mystery.
The play, incidentally, contributes mightily to my livelihood, and that of everyone at Yale University Press. A brief version of the rather sordid reason why can be found at Answers.com.
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