User Reviews

I saw this version of Long Day's Journey into Night several years ago on PBS Great Performances. I tuned in because I had misread the credits in the TV listing. I thought the star was William Hurt, and I wanted to see his interpretation of James Tyrone (even though he would have been too young to play him at the time). My initial disappointment vanished as I began to see how good William Hutt and the other cast members were. I now have four different version of this, my favorite play -- Katherine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson, Jack Lemon, Laurence Olivier, and this one. This is by far the best. All five performances (even the maid) are magnificent. The setting and direction are flawless. Director David Wellington resists a needless 'opening up' of the play onto the veranda, the lawn, or the garage. He maintains a close-up focus on the actors, so that every fleeting emotion is seen and felt. It's the drama of the characters revealing their innermost thoughts and fears to each other that grabs you.

I've watched my tape of the PBS presentation many times, and was thrilled to find this gem on DVD at Amazon. Anyone who enjoys great theater and great acting is in for a treat with this Canadian production from the Stratford Festival. A 10 out of 10.

Available on amazon...search B0015S4BCE Hutt was incredible in this part. He resets the bar for James Tyrone. All other film versions fade. Any students of acting need to see this film. It is a study of emotional recall and what is possible after fifty plus years of mastering the craft of acting. Hutt owns the character, every word, every nuanced thought, to a depth perhaps only achievable after a long stage run. Bill Hutt may be the last of the great 'stage actors' - what a loss for Canadian theatre. Also, past away now is Peter Donaldson another great. Have a glass of bourbon and toast them both as you enjoy this film.

This movie was very good. I really enjoyed it. Tom McCamus' performance was excellent and very believable as the consumptive son Edmund. I also enjoyed the set design (house) and the costumes.

If you are an actor, or want to be, or if you simply love to see consummate acting, watch this film. It left me used up and drained, in a way that only total absorption can achieve. A cast of finely skilled craftsmen as ever you would desire bring to their director, their designers, their author, the whole service of their art. Of course, they are part of the Stratford Festival (Canada) and the benefit of the disciplines a repertory company demands shine. Not a household name (outside our Home and Native Land) among them, and what does that matter anyway. Buy the video. You will watch it again and again.

I wasn't aware of the existence of this television production of O'Neill's agonized masterpiece until it turned up on PBS tonight. It's excellent. Bill Hutt is Canada's greatest stage actor and I have never (to my knowledge) seen him on the screen; he is magnificent. All the acting is wonderful, and with all due respect to the very good visual elements, all the emphasis is on the actors' conveyance of O'Neill's text. It is shot almost entirely in close-ups, rendering it an intimate, dark and claustrophobic production of the most intimate, dark and claustrophobic play in the English-speaking theatre.

This is a perfect movie. The acting, the cinematography, the camera correography, the set design, the music. It's a gorgeous, sad, beautiuful piece of work. I am simply in awe of this movie.

I had never heard of this production until I looked up William Hutt after seeing his titanic performance in Season 3 of SLINGS AND ARROWS, in which he plays the dying actor cast as King Lear. I see that Martha Burns of SLINGS is in this production too, as Cathleen the maid.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY is one of my favorite plays, and the 1962 production with Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson is one of my favorite movies. The 1973 Laurence Olivier-Constance Cummings I found almost as good, the 1987 version with Jack Lemmon and Bethel Leslie rather less so, despite a first-rate cast. This production sounds like it might have been just about perfect, and I'd love to see it, but I can't find it on Amazon (US or Canada) or any other source. Does anyone know where it's available?