Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9267 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-05-11
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Colour, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 180 minutes

Customer Reviews

Hepburn deserves better than this
Ageing morphinist Mary Tyrone slides headlong into madness and addiction as the hours pass in the country house with husband James, a hammy and has-been matiné idol, and sons Edmund, dying from pneumonia, and James Jr., an aggressive drunk.

Eugene O'Neill's play was only a slightly dramatized account of his own family life when he was a kid. The play, of which Lumet's TV film is a very loyal depiction, is pretty predictable in the way it stages its climaxes and obvious in its carefully sketched opposites, but it has a basic, driven energy that holds up even now.

So, was Katharine Hepburn ever better than in the virtuoso part as Mary Tyrone? She has done movies that are far better, but was she herself ever more convincing? You are never allowed to forget that this is play-acting, not a slice of real life, but it is still quite riveting to watch her, and I am overawed at her willingness to take risks. She and her three co-stars all were awarded the year's acting awards at Cannes, but the years haven't been kind to Ralph Richardson's outrageously histrionic Tyrone, far more superficial and complacent than even Tyrone the Ham himself would have played it.

The studio did not do a good job with their alleged digital restoration of 'Long Day's Journey'. Frankly, the DVD looks awful, scratchy and blurry.