In 1941, Eugene O'Neill wrote a scathing family drama so closely tied to his own upbringing that he would not allow the play produced during his lifetime. This exploration of festering family relations was brought to the screen virtually intact, Director Lumet retaining almost 95% of O'Neill's dialogue. The film was produced on a budget of a mere $435,000 and won critical acclaim at Cannes, where a special joint acting award was presented to the four principal players. Mary Tyrone (Katharine Hepburn), a high-strung morphine addict, is the shame of the family; her husband James (Sir Ralph Richardson) is a bitterly frustrated matinee idol turned worshipper of money; their son Jamie (Jason Robards) drinks to drown his own failures and the hypocrisy of his parents; and their younger son Edmund (Dean Stockwell) is the frail poet, stricken with tuberculosis. O'Neill called the play one of "old sorrow, written in tears and blood." Boris Kaufman's cinematography (On the Waterfront, L'Atalante) does justice to the grim reality of the conflict. Since the drama begins in daytime and slowly progresses to the dark of night, Kaufman's interplay of light and shadow makes the transition to darkness almost indetectable. Lumet shot O'Neill's play in chronological order to allow for natural character development and confined the emotional turmoil to a Victorian mansion built inside a sound stage, a fact which caused much grumbling among film purists. But as Pauline Kael has written, "After such an experience, I don't see how one can niggle over whether it's 'cinema' or merely 'filmed theater.' Whatever it is, it's great." Tonight's print has been restored to its original length of 174 minutes, using original camera negatives supplied by Republic Pictures.