A Serpent That Eats Its Tail

Long Day's Journey into Night. Life is depicted by primitives as a serpent that eats its own tail. The serpent signifies a state of being in which pleasure and pain, life and death, eating and being eaten are the same thing. To a primitive, this state is paradise. To a conscious man. it is madness. To Eugene O'Neill, it was home. And this home, the family that nourished and devoured him, that cosseted and tortured him to greatness, the playwright has described with withering hatred and burning pity and heartsick unutterable despair in a tragedy that stands among the strangest and strongest of the century.

Journey was produced on Broadway in 1956, three years after the playwright's death. Translated to the screen by Director Sidney Lumet, who has added nothing to O'Neill's playscript and taken very little away, Journey provides a raw red slice of family life, liberally garnished with rotgut, morphine, vitriol and sour grapes, that takes more than three hours (allowing intermission) to digest. But it feeds the inner man.'

Time: 1912. Place: a summer house on the New England coast. Characters:

FATHER (Sir Ralph Richardson) is an aging but still vigorous actor who went hungry as a child and has never forgotten it. As a matinee idol he got rich quick, but for fear of the poorhouse he ruined his career and destroyed his wife. When he made a hit in a cheap meller, he played nothing else for a decade. And when his wife had a pain one night, he sent her to a cheap quack who cynically put the poor girl on morphine.

MOTHER (Katharine Hepburn) is a charming, drug-ravaged must-have-been-a-beauty who grew up in a convent and dreamed of becoming a nun. But then one day Father swept her off her feet and into a squalid succession of "dirty rooms in one-night-stand hotels.'' When the morphine came along she was desperately ready for it, and after more than 20 years of the needle her soul is as full of holes as her skin.

JAMIE (Jason Robards Jr.), the elder son. is a writer who never really wrote and an actor who can hardly act, a noisy Irish drunk who at 33 has just about worn out his ne'er-do-welcome. But he loves his younger brother well enough to warn him that he hates him too and wishes he were dead--that way he wouldn't have to compare their talents and admit his own inferiority.

EDMUND (Dean Stockwell), the younger brother, is O'Neill as he was, or fondly remembered he was, at 23: a sailor home from the sea with consumption, a secret scribbler who longed to be a poet but guessed he lacked the gift.

Story there is almost none. At the beginning of the play the family is wondering whether Edmund has really got consumption and whether Mother, who has just come home from a sanatorium, has really kicked the habit. At the end of the play the family has found out that he has and she hasn't. Otherwise, the characters have done nothing but talk, talk, talk. True, in the course of the talk they reveal themselves as few characters in all the history of drama are revealed: to the depth of their shallowness, at the height of their absurdity, in the humanity of their inhumanity. But if there is revelation there is no development. In a kind of folie `a quatre they go over and over and over the same ground, and end where they began--like the serpent that eats its own tail.

Director Lumet calls his shots so skillfully that the spectator soon forgets the film is merely a photographed play, and he works his actors for all they are worth. Robards, as he did on Broadway, makes a luminously likable louse; Richardson lacks the fire and charm of Fredric March, but he plays with wit and penetration; Stockwell, in the weakest of the parts, adds up at least as well as Bradford Dillman did; and Hepburn, though she establishes too vivid a presence for a woman who is largely an absence, nevertheless centers in intensity a drama that Florence Eldridge enveloped in pathos.

But the play is stronger than the players. In his anguished sincerity, in his dogged loyalty to his , own experience, O'Neill sees deeper perhaps than any other dramatist has ever seen into family life. He sees its animal warmth, its blessed monotony, its healing private humor. And he sees all the terrible things people do to each other in the name of love.

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