Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night: "Crumble and fade and--regrets--recriminations … 'If you'd done this, it wouldn't've cost me that!' " - Page 5

With this in mind, it seems to me Vanessa Redgrave doesn't bring many natural assets to the piece, aside from her regal quality. But Mary's grandeur isn't that important. It's mostly the pretension of a middle-class, middlewestern Catholic schoolgirl, anyway, as her husband tells their son toward the end of the night. What Katharine Hepburn, and Ralph Richardson opposite her, have that's so important is a talent for high comedy.

As Mary, Hepburn uses her brittle high style in a newly macabre way: clutching her bosom as she gives her sacred word of honor to Edmund, a gesture so phony Mary herself can't help commenting on its futility; or bringing her hand down for emphasis as she hollers, "I hate doctors!" and sending the silverware flying off the table. Hepburn's daring is in implicating her high comic skills in Mary's manipulativeness and then leading us from disillusionment with Mary to Mary's own sweeping sense of disillusionment, which she takes drugs to dull. Somehow the desperate, weirdly incongruous comedy belongs with such lines as, "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever." Hepburn achieves tragedy through comedy. This is just what she failed to do in The Lion in Winter (1968) and, more regrettably since it's more interesting material, in Tony Richardson's screen version of Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance (1973), in both of which she reaches prematurely for pathetic and poetic effects and drops the comedy, as if it were merely a time-killer between "big" moments. Long Day's Journey is Hepburn's greatest performance and easily one of the top five or so dramatic performances ever given by an actress in American movies.

I watched Redgrave's intelligent, committed acting and wondered what Maggie Smith, an actress who knows the full value of comic delivery and timing, could have done with the role. In a sense she's already played it, magnificently, as the alcoholic Irish spinster in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), but O'Neill is more merciless than Brian Moore who wrote the source novel. He's relentless no doubt because Mary is a mother. Her addiction is all the worse for her sons because it means she wants to escape from them as elements in the life marriage has given her. (When she says, "I really love the fog.… It hides you from the world and the world from you…. No one can find or touch you any more," she means everyone in the world.) In terms of the irony of the status of modern tragic figures, Tyrone is merely Broadway royalty (the Count of Monte Cristo, in fact, which is the theatrical property, unnamed in the play, that O'Neill's father wasted his talent on, including a 1913 movie version), while Mary is named for the queen of heaven, whom she invokes repeatedly. We don't have to decide whether it's worse to have an emotionally remote junkie for a mother or a heavy drinking miser for a father, but it's different in as much as we expect our mother to be a source of comfort and an intercessor, to be especially close to us. To O'Neill, certainly, it seems that having a mother who can't wait to get you out of the house, who is sorry you were born, causes a pain that the bullying of a narrow-minded, domineering father can't compare to.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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