house of actors
by
Douglas Messerli
Eugene
O’Neill (author of the play), Sidney Lumet (director) Long Day’s Journey into Night / 1962
After
the production of O’Neill’s play Long
Day’s Journey into Night at the Geffen Playhouse, I determined to revisit
the 1962 film version, directed by Sidney Lumet.
I have often stated that I think this is
one of the great interpretations of the O’Neill drama, given the high standards
of performance by Katharine Hepburn, Sir Ralph Richardson, long-time O’Neill
performer Jason Robards, and the young, but quite capable, Dean Stockwell,
whose performance seemed to have been much stronger in this viewing than I
originally recalled it to be.
First of all, what immediately struck me
is that this film, coming in just under three hours, includes so many scenes
that were simply cut from the performance I saw the other night, which,
perhaps, at times ineffectually literalizes the information we receive about
the Tyrone family, but also truly enhances our outstanding of their lives.
Far more importantly, in this review, I
realized just how truly theatrical—and I mean that quite literally—O’Neill’s
play is. Many critics have compared the great American playwright’s work to
Anton Chekov, and those comparisons, often bear fruit. After all, Chekov’s The Seagull, for example, is also about
a young would-be playwright, actresses, and a noted writer. But what most
struck me this time through—and how could it not be with the acting credits of
its cast—was just how much about theater this play was concerned. Of course,
James Tyrone, Sr, is an actor, a fact of which he will never let anyone in his
family forget, citing Shakespeare and his numerous other roles endlessly, even
though we know him to be currently a ham actor, a role which he brings to all
of his encounters with life, including, we perceive, the offstage encounters
with numerous of his friends, who stiff him, while listening to his almost
endless monologues, with bad property deals. Tyrone Sr. is so infatuated with
his own voice, and has so memorized the lines/lies of his life that he can call
them up by rote whenever he needs them. We may even doubt the greatness of his
acting ability which he proves again and again through perhaps a non-existent
sentences of praise by Edwin Booth—which he has saved, just as his wife Mary
has saved her wedding gown, in an old forgotten trunk—but we cannot deny, given
Richardson’s grand performance, his powerful gift of rhetoric. Tyrone can spin
every sentence he utters upon a whim of emotional shift. One second he is
spitting out venom, mostly for the behavior of his elder son, Jaime, but often
lashing out equally against Edmund and Mary, while the very next second his
whole voice and body rejects his comments with terrible regret. James Tyrone is
a shifting phantom out of control, like the nightly fog-horn his wife hates, a
bellicose beast (like the fog-horn he snores throughout the night) that is, at
the same time, sorry about each moment of speech he bellows out.
As the play continues, he comes more and
more to regret his ugly, if elegant utterances. And by the end of the film he
has no longer choice but to remain silent.
Jaime too, switches masks from moment to moment,
best friend and companion—even a brotherly lover—to self-loathing hater, a man
who would easily, like Jacob imagine killing his younger brother, Esau. After
all, Edmund has, so to speak, already gone to the heathens, traveling over the
globe; while Jaime, despite his hatred of his father and mother, has stayed on
to tend them.
Just like his father, Jaime switches from
his cynicism to a sentimental maudlin emotional response that comes from a
career of acting, hating himself so desperately that his is willing to save fat
Violet from being fired by joining her in a night a painful sexual release. In
the end, Jaime is a ham actor in his father’s tradition.
But Mary is the surprising one, and the
way Hepburn portrays her, we recognize that she is the best actor of them all;
even from the very first scenes of the work, teasing her husband for his
endless snoring, and her portraying her own night wanderings as an omission of
worry for her younger son’s health, we perceive her immense capabilities of
portrayal, of lies and deceit. Yes, she is “watching” them “watching her,” the
way any great lead knows she is being watched even as she is watching her
audience admiring her. And we grow quickly to perceive that Mary has shifted
her role from being the now recovered addict to a highly tragic heroine even
before the curtain has been raised.
Hepburn, in this film, is at her very
finest: embracing her family members at the very moment she slits their
throats, offering up her saintly presence while coquettishly playing a bitter
whore. I now realize why Hepburn’s performance has never left my mind. At every
moment she mercurially shifts from one person into another, loving and hating
in the very same breath, blaming and forgiving, imagining and forgetting. No
one cannot fall in love with her and no one with, even a little bit of sanity,
cannot detest her. She is constantly on fire, a beautiful flame not to be
entrusted to mankind. She has made up a person so costumed and perfect—her
constant fear of her hair having fallen down betraying her own highly artificed
demeanor—that she is a kind of living monster, all mask with, ultimately, no
life within.
Even her maid, Cathleen, cannot imagine
why her mistress has not gone “into acting.” Who might not imagine that Mary is
the greatest actor in her family? But Mary pretends shock, no, she would never
have even thought to cross the stage; she is a saint—a woman she claims who
once thought of becoming a nun and imagined a career as a concert pianist—the
delusions that any great actress must have in order to convince the world of
her performative wonders.
There is no better actress in the world
than Mary Tyrone, and her family knows it. When she plays a role she is lost to
the living, she is no longer a mother, a wife. Hepburn has never had a better
role.
The only way Edmund can regain control is
with the death of his dramatic personae, which, in just a few years, he lost,
enabling him to create his own very different casts. His second beloved wife
and one of his sons themselves became addicts—clearly his was in a family
tradition. And wasn’t O’Neill himself a kind of addict of and to the theater, disavowing
his own daughter, Oona for marrying another actor, Charlie Chaplin, and herself
becoming an actor?
The Tyrone (O’Neill) house was a house of
actors, and I believe Eugene, although obviously depending up their kind for
the rest of his life, never really forgave their breed for their “false”
portrayals of the world. Perhaps that’s why he is so very specific in his dramatic
instructions.
Los Angeles,
March 3, 2017
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