I watched most of this last night. Miss Hepburn’s performance was astonishingly good, IMHO. (But I kept wanting to fix her hair.)
Damn, what a family! That was really hard to watch, all those recriminations and regrets and apologies – years of it, packed into one day and night.
I fell asleep with about an hour left. Can someone tell me how it ends? Or did it end? Was there any resolution, or just the sense that the next day would be more of the same?
It did seem like maybe for the first time, some things (dad’s miserliness and momma’s addiction) were being spoken about openly. That gave me hope.
Did you miss Sir Ralph’s part where he talked about his childhood & how he sold out? That was great, but when Jason Robards came back home and proceeded from “I’m drunker than a fiddler’s bitch” it blew me away. I get choked up just remembering it. Everything about being Irish-American is in it: the father-son rage, the cultural inferiority complex, parsimoniousness and pig-headedness, booze, booze, self-loathing and more rage.
Probably a spoiler, but not that anyone’s suprised; Katherine Hepburn shoots up and rambles on out of her gourd at the end.
Sir Ralph was just starting to tell Edmund about his childhood when I fell asleep.
Guess I’ll put it in the Netflix queue and finish watching.
I wanted them to just let Mary be. They didn’t know how to help her. She didn’t know how to help herself. The situation was hopeless. Is that how they needed it to be? Did Sir Ralph need Mary to be addicted? Was it an excuse for his own rotten behavior?
Good lord, did they hire a Katharine Hepburn drag queen for that film? I got through half an hour of her Hepburning all over the place before I had to turn it off.
Though the 3 other male actors are quite good, I’ve never been able to get over Kate’s heightened affectations (yet she was the only one to score an Oscar nod). A shame because I love the play (O’Neill’s never had the kind of treatment Williams has had cinematically), but she’s simply too much of a distraction.
You think she over-acted the part? She drove me nuts too, but I thought she did fine – up and down, up and down – and the scene where she’s describing her wedding dress, where she finds herself in a seductive pose and then immediately straightens up – that was great.
Wouldn’t you have to be a bit over the top to make it work, portraying a drug addict doing histrionics?
Over-the-top is one thing, but it all smacked of gimmickry and mannerisms, without burrowing into the character with the consistency of her castmates. And adapting any time of sing-slongy presentation is going to challenge a viewer’s tolerance–in some cases successfully, but I’m afraid in this case (IMHO), not.
