Movies: Economy-Class Journey

Ten months ago. Actress Katharine Hepburn got a phone call in Hollywood.

It was Producer Ely Landau, and he wanted her to star in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Demanded Hepburn: “Who’s doing the script?” Replied Landau: “O’Neill.” There was a long pause as the full significance of the answer sank in. Then Kate cried: “Marvelous!” and agreed to sign.

In fact, she was so taken with the idea of doing O’Neill pure that she accepted without demurrer the other half of Landau’s proposition—to work for a fraction of her usual fee, which in her case meant the difference between $25,000 and her customary price of $250,000 a picture. She would also get a percentage of the take.

Lured by the same artistic bait, Sir Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr. and Dean Stockwell also agreed to work for less. Landau saved further by eliminating the expensive teams of scriptwriters who customarily turn a theater classic into unrecognizable hokum. Last week Landau, who has long been outraged by Hollywood’s multimillion-dollar spending to produce supercolossal flummery, premiered his film at the Cannes Festival with the announcement that it had cost only $435,000.

Ripped Walls. The picture was made entirely in New York City with little budgetary corner-cutting. The cast had three weeks’ rehearsal before a camera rolled; scenes were done in original sequence so that the actors might have a chance to develop their roles naturally; except for a few scenes made outside an old Victorian house on The Bronx’s City Island, the whole picture was shot in a complete house built on the sound stage.

So faithfully did Producer Landau and Director Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men) adhere to the original that only eleven pages of the text were cut to get the film down to three hours. The play, a long slice of O’Neill self-fictionalized autobiography, deals with the bedeviled Tyrone family—the mother a pitiful dope addict, the father a stingy sot, the younger son a tuberculosis victim, and the elder son a cynical lush.

Torrent or Ordeal. French critics took Journey to task for its faithfulness to the stage version, complaining that the film was a “slavishly unimaginative transposition of theater to screen.” To foreigners, the torrential flow of talk, which O’Neill uses to bludgeon home his message, seemed merely an ordeal. Lumet replied: “I believe there is room for literature on the screen.” But the format seemed to have inspired Journey’s stars. Last week’s Cannes Festival jury awarded a collective top-acting prize to Journey’s four stars—though they had to share their honors with A Taste of Honey stars. Rita Tush-ingham and Murray Melvin.

Journey had been bid for by most major studios (with offers as high as $500,000 for the script alone), but Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, widow of the playwright, guarded her husband’s works diligently. She was so impressed by the Landau-Lumet production of The Iceman Cometh on television’s Play of the Week series that she entrusted to Landau the TV-movie rights to a sizable O’Neill portfolio: all of the plays that have reverted to her control. Landau hopes soon to film more O’Neill, with top casts and directors.

His aim: to fill what he conceives to be a huge gap in U.S. moviemaking—the hole between the multimillion-dollar Hollywood spectacular and the “very special” art theater film.