Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962)

"long day's journey into night" is faithfully adapted from eugene o'neill's semi-autobiographical play which is also his greatest work alive, and it deepens further upon katherine hepburn's prestige as a versatile accomplished actress since she again receives academy award nomination for it. frequently i tackle into the issue of purist notion of dialogue-driven movies as the supreme essence of cinema, and "long day's journey into night" would be a perfect exemplification with a masterful script as well as its refined stagy casting. but the film lacks public appeal due to its thick element of constant dialogue-focus as well as its unflattering 3 hour screen time, to enable the film's production, hepburn had to reduce her own payment for this exasperatingly heavy role, and she made it but under one condition: the movie has to be meticulously devout to its original play. the story's basically about the collapse of a problematic family addled with morphine addiction, alcoholism, capitalist money-slavery, unreconciled pessismism upon death gravitated by consumption illness. the sceneries whirl around the haunting phatom of past memories as the fog forshadows every misery into the belligerent darkness of nightmarish hell, each character imprisioned by his/her tragic flaws and the unredeemed mistakes made in the past. dean stockwell who plays the youngest son inflicted with consumption demonstrates an amazing horrowingly melancholic attribute which could emulate james dean, whose youthful good looks inspires your ideal personification of a depressed poet once as he frowns. the flick has a strong claustrophic atmosphere with fixed backset and four steady actors constantly upstaging each other with the uncanny puncturality. if you're a cinema purist with a virtue of patience to read into dialogues, "long day's journey into night" would be a gem to elaborate your mind's empathetic capacity for life's poetic sorrow of dacadence.