![]() ![]() Composer Henry Mancini’s bluegrass score practically frolics, while Newman’s irrepressible charms endow Hank Stamper with righteous irascibility, as he chainsaws union desks in half and essentially leaves Wakonda to rot while on strike. The Stamper house, built by Universal Studios on the Siletz River near Kernville, is more attractive than the novel’s half-drowned monument to stubbornness. Meanwhile, Kesey bestows Oregon nature with an almost alien power to inspire and madden the Stampers.īy comparison, much of the film’s ambience is almost jaunty, as though the production couldn’t help but be impressed with its own riches of talent, source material and location. In the space of one page, the reader might plunge through three timelines of genealogy and perspective with unfilmable fluidity. In Kesey’s opus, both the setting and style are torrential. The film opens as though washed landward by the Pacific, an aerial shot combing the Central Oregon coastline while country music groundbreaker Charley Pride croons the gospel sentiments of “All His Children.” As establishing shots go, they seldom get more stunning, but we immediately see the movie veer in its own tonal direction. The Stampers have turned scab in the face of a timber strike, and one need only consult the family motto-”never give a inch”-to understand why they’ll keep on cutting, dammit. That, or maybe Paul Newman bought your uncle a beer in Newport during the summer of 1970, per the myriad boozy stories surrounding the film shoot.įifty years old this month, this Paul Newman-directed drama unravels the pathological grit of the Stamper clan, a family of loggers in the fictional coastal enclave of Wakonda, Oregon. ![]() With One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (based on another Kesey novel, of course) ranking among the state’s most famous film productions, only devotees of Oregon film history or ‘70s cinema likely recall much about Notion the movie. While Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion is regarded as perhaps the quintessential Oregon novel, its 1971 film adaptation is more like a forgotten little brother. Tell them the old bartender from the "Embarcadero" sent you.Sometimes a Great Notion (Biggest Trailer Database) By Chance Solem-Pfeifer Decemat 9:00 pm PST Also, if you ever make it to Newport, Oregon, visit the harbor bar "Bay Haven" where the scenes for the "Snag" were filmed. If you can, however, read the novel first and then catch the film. If nothing else, it chronicles some great, authentic-looking logging footage. In spite of all that, it's still a worthwhile movie to watch. They're just barely eluded to in the film version. I've recently watched the rental again (2005) and found more in the film than I had remembered, but I still feel that unless you've read the book, you can't truly understand what this movie and the character motivations are all about. I later rented the video but even with the unedited version of the film, I found the story very lacking and barely comprehensive. ![]() The book was an amazingly nuanced work of fiction with a great deal of depth and under-story (reading between the lines) none of which I saw on the TV screening. I loved Kesey's book "Cookoo's Nest" so read the novel of "Sometimes" to try to make some sense of what the story was all about. It was so chopped-up for television that the story, character motivations, and ending made no sense at all to me. I remember the first time I saw this movie was in the late 70's on TV (Portland's KPTV-12). The perfect cast (the book even mentions Hank Stamper as looking like a muscular Paul Newman!), and some great performances (Fonda, Jaeckel, Remick), but the story just doesn't come across on film the way it should. Unfortunately, as much as I love Paul Newman as an actor, the movie version of Ken Kesey's incredible book could have used a more seasoned director for its translation to the big screen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |