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Adapted directly from the play by Eugene O’Neil (considered the Nobel laureate’s magnum opus), Long Day’s Journey into Night is a four-act study of addiction and recrimination that the playwright claimed was written “in tears and blood”.

Taking place over a single, fateful day in the summer of 1912, the Tyrone family (modelled after O’Neil’s own) confront their bitter failings and long-held resentments. Patriarch James (Ralph Richardson) is a renowned stage actor who’s never forgotten his squalid Irish childhood, and has forsaken artistic ambition for commercial success. His wife Mary (Katharine Hepburn) has developed a morphine addiction, his eldest son Jamie (Jason Robards) is a violent alcoholic and failed actor, and his youngest (and clearly favoured) son Edmund (Dean Stockwell) is a nervous young man in poor health. All of them have something painful to say, and their silence is even worse.

Directed by Sidney Lumet (Serpico, The Offence), whose instinctive understanding of adaptation and near-telepathic rapport with actors made him the perfect director for the material (Lumet had previously adapted O’Neil’s The Iceman Cometh into an acclaimed TV drama, also starring Jason Robards), The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Long Day’s Journey into Night in its UK debut on Blu-ray and DVD in a special dual-format edition.

SPECIAL FEATURES

1080p presentation of the film on Blu-ray, from a high-definition digital transfer
Progressive encode on DVD
Optional English subtitles
Brand new feature-length audio commentary by author Scott Harrison
Brand new and exclusive video essay by Lee Gambin
Trailer
A collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Philip Kemp

This calls for someone to snag an interview with Dean Stockwell!! Toute suite!!

That’s going to be a really long commentary

This was okay but it falls apart in the last hour when Hepburn withdraws. All the actors are fine and they (suitably) go all out into Hamville, but Robards’ character is not very interesting and the film relying on him for the home stretch is a flaw in the source material. I hadn’t read the play or seen it performed, so Hepburn’s mysterious malady retained its surprise, though I now see MOC decided to spoil it in their little write up! Unlike the ridiculous silent treatment of Redgrave’s affliction in Indicator’s writeup for Time Without Pity, which is explicit from the get go in that film, this movie doesn’t reveal the true nature of what’s going on with Hepburn until halfway through the movie (the gradual release of information is of course very typical of most structured plays of this nature), and so it’s a genuine spoiler here