![]() ![]() It’s a doorstopper of a book running to over 600 pages and it is not an easy read, but it is very rewarding. Fewer though might be familiar with Kesey’s second novel, ‘ Sometimes a Great Notion ’, written in 1964 – which a good number would claim to be the superior literary work. There may well be even fewer who are not familiar with the film version, featuring one of Jack Nicholson’s greatest performances – wherein he acts rather than mugs his way through proceedings. It’s my guess that there won’t be many readers of this website that are not familiar with Ken Kesey and his most famous book, ‘ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ’. Man against nature, rugged individualism, small-town life, family, relationships, love and death – that sort of thing! Hopefully, the choice I have made embodies some of those themes that exemplify much that is American and that the writers we tend to admire pen songs about. It feels like a good idea to widen the scope of this feature with a novel or two, perhaps a volume that has been unjustly neglected. ![]() Instead, they're clumsy, resentful enemies, and when they try to sabotage a Stamper lumber raft, they only wind up drifting out to sea - and having to be rescued by the Stampers.A dark family drama played out in a rough world of its own. All through the film, he avoids making the strikers into heavies and their hatred for the Stampers seem melodramatic. The game develops into a brawl, of course, but in an interesting way instead of going for a hard-action approach to the scene, Newman shoots it in a sort of twilight, bittersweet style. Some of the strikers invite some of the Stampers to a game of touch football. The direction of this scene is superb the reality and the danger of the huge logs are caught in a way that defines the men and their job better than any dialogue could.Īnother scene that reveals Newman's insight as a director takes place at a lumbermen's picnic. The Stamper men seem terribly small as they bring enormous trees crashing to the ground, wrap chains around them, and load them on trucks with big, muscle-bound machines. The best scene in the film takes place during a day of work. ![]() Newman shortchanges what you might call the indoor scenes in order to give us the lumber business. ![]() The character is left wavering, and we don't fully understand her relationship to her husband. There are a lot of things left fairly unclear, though I'm not quite sure what was on Remick's mind during most of the movie. Sarrazin, Newman's half-brother by Fonda's second wife, comes home to help -and also to mope, to get over a bummer of a year, and to suggest to Newman's wife ( Lee Remick) that maybe she should clear out from the obsessed Stamper clan. But the Stamper family continues to work in defiance of the strike, and despite the fact that Fonda has broken half the bones on his left side in an accident. The striking timber workers idly hang around the union office. The local merchants (especially the neurotic fellow who runs the movie theater and the dry cleaners) are going broke because money has dried up. The story takes place during a timber strike in the Northwest. He rarely pushes scenes to their obvious conclusions, he avoids melodrama, and by the end of "Sometimes a Great Notion," we somehow come to know the Stamper family better than we expected to. But then Newman starts tunneling under the material, coming up with all sorts of things we didn't quite expect, and along the way he proves himself (as he did with "Rachel, Rachel") as a director of sympathy and a sort of lyrical restraint. ![]()
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