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 7

At the same time, Leonard is involved in all the acts of physical violence and his response when Redgrave grabs him by the short hairs is truly shocking. This violation of the fifth commandment is so important to the play because we identify with his rage, and yet recoil from that identification, an oscillating motion that brings home to us that our parents' failings with respect to us are a form of frailty. We can actually feel pity for our own helpless anger, and the objects of it, while our fists are clenching. And I experienced this in a production I thought was mediocre. If you've had the rare luck to grow up in a happy family this play may mean nothing to you. But if your family life was more like mine, you may find yourself haunted by it as I have been ever since I read it. To me it feels like all family secrets (short of incest) acted out for the world; I have no defenses against it. It plays out as bizarre, bordering on the monstrous, and yet utterly true.

Vanessa Redgrave is fairly well represented on film. If you want to see the full range of her heroic artistry, catch her in Chekhov's The Sea Gull (1968), Isadora (1968; as the mother of modern dance, Isadora Duncan), Euripides's Trojan Women (1971; as Andromache), Julia (1977), Henry James's The Bostonians (1984), David Hare's Wetherby (1985), Prick Up Your Ears (1987), and E.M. Forster's Howards End (1992).

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.

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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