It doesn't help much that I watched this acclaimed film version of a Eugene O'Neill play right after suffering through a far more obnoxious filmed play (William Gibson's Two for the Seesaw, made the same year). Frankly, I just don't care for the theater, and these films underline pretty well the reasons why. I look at theater as a bunch of people (or two, in the case of Seesaw) on stage bellowing at each other for however many hours (three, in this film's case) while somehow refraining from falling victim to laryngitis. Long Day's Journey Into Night suffers from a lot of clichés: drug addiction, alcoholism, disappointment in lives, and, God help me, consumption (which I thought was just a disease made up by poets and playwrights, but it turns out it's just tuberculosis; "consumption" does sound cooler). Lumet tries to inject some filmmaking into the picture (as he did wonderfully with the equally stagebound 12 Angry Men a few years earlier), mostly in its beautiful final moments (the cinematography, I must admit, is fine throughout, though I really like '60s black and white), but mostly it's very static and is comprised of people talking steadily for the 180 minutes, give or take about three minutes of silence (the film's best moments). I'll give this a slight pass, however, for the acting, as stagebound as it may be. The acting to which I refer is not just Katharine Hepburn's, though hers was very good, too. Dean Stockwell, in my estimation, gives the film's best performance. Jason Robards and Ralph Richardson round out the cast. I thought they were both a bit overwrought, but not bad.