Long Day's Journey Into Night

Landmark film....medicore presentation from Artisan/Republic
Another strip-down medicore presentation from Artisan....

This is a landmark brilliant film of perhaps Eugene O'Neill's great play. The directing by Sidney Lumet and the acting by Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell is nothing less than amazing. This has got to be one of the 3 all-time greatest performaces from the late Ms. Hepburn!

Simply one of the most amazing films of the 1960's.

This should have been issued on Criteron. We should have gotten a first-rate restoration job with either a good documentary/back story on the making of the film, or a commentary by the two survivors of the film, Dean Stockwell and Sidney Lumet.

Instead we get a nearly public-domain quality release.

I'm so happy to finally get this important film on DVD...but I'm utterly disappointed at the slap-dash quality one has come to expect from Artisan.

Absolutely Definitive
This is perhaps the finest film of a serious American play ever produced. The acting, the direction, the music (by Andre Previn), the cinematography, and (most of all) the timeless anguish of Eugene O'Neill's script---all come together in a film so astonishingly powerful that it will take your breath away.

If there is a complaint to be lodged about this film, it is this: that the performances of the four leads (Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell) are so definitive that, at least for me, watching any other version of this play has become impossible. I walked out on a well-reviewed live staging at intermission and turned off the PBS remake with Jack Lemmon at the end of the first act. It should not be this way, but it is: the filmmmakers did their work all too well!

Be forewarned: this film is very long (three hours), very talky, and very, very bleak. If you are expecting car crashes or hot sex scenes, look elsewhere. When Hollywood...

FIVE stars for the performances, ONE star for DVD quality
I agree with the reviews, the performances are absolutely stunning, especially Katharine Hepburn's, possibly the best of her career if not one of the best ever captured on film.

HOWEVER, this DVD release is atrocious. This is close to a three-hour film and they crammed on to one disc. That wouldn't be so bad had they done a new transfer, but this looks like the same one used for the VHS tape. Cropped for the TV screen like the video release, (this was definitely shot in widescreen, according to imdb.com), it's got the same gritty, low-res quality. You could tape this movie off of TCM or Bravo and get better quality. Rent it, tape it, but hold off on buying this until it's given a proper DVD release (if anyone from the Criterion Collection's listening, please license this movie!)

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