James Tyrone is an aging actor and an alcoholic miser who has spent a lifetime treading on the spirit of his dope-addicted wife, Mary. His oldest son Jamie is a troublemaking alcoholic who is envious of the writing talent of his sickly younger brother, Edmund. The three Tyrone men will spend a hellish night together when they sit about drunkenly while Mary hallucinates about her younger and happier days.

REGARDLESS how much torment of troubled souls is potentially packed into the dense and combustible words of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," the final test of this great drama is in how it is presented and played.... One might wish that the action were more mobile, that Mr. Lumet had been able to use his camera to a lot more purpose... One might wish, too, that the bits of mood music that are heard from time to time did not startle one with the impression that they were coming from someone playing a piano in another room.But these are marginal observations. For what they have set out to do, Mr. Lumet and the producer, Ely Landau, have given us a fine, fair picture of a tough and maybe tedious O'Neill play.

... this extremely long, one-set drama has been placed on film. Why? Among the praised plays of this century, is there one less suitable for filming? The project seems to be the work of what can be called the TV mind. One of the chief "serious" functions of television has been the adaptation of plays of merit, lopping and cramming them into fixed time and limited space, for which the carpenters expect gratitude because TV has brought Something Good to a vast public....This theatrical whale has been stranded on the beach of another medium; it is robbed of whatever grace and integral movement it had in its natural element and is left with only its size and some hints of majesty to impress us.

This is an excellent film adaption of the late Eugene O’Neill’s lengthy stage work. It has power in its characters and their tortured introspective lives. There have been a few cuts but otherwise it is as O’Neill wrote it. And his powerful language manages to overcome the limited sets and dependence on the spoken word.