‘Long Day’s Journey into Night is everything one can hope for’, wrote Sidney Lumet of his adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s seminal 1956 play in his indispensable guidebook-cum-memoir Making Movies; ‘four characters come together and leave no area of life unexplored’. A coruscating study of addiction and recrimination, the drama unfolds inexorably over the course of a single harrowing day in the late summer of 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the dysfunctional Tyrone family, Mary (Katharine Hepburn), James Sr. (Ralph Richardson), and their grown sons James Jr. (Jason Robards) and Edmund (Dean Stockwell). As a blanket of fog descends, the family confront their bitter failings and long-held resentments in a series of devastating exchanges.

Notes by David O Mahony

Screening as part of Katharine Hepburn: Woman of the Year season.