Sometimes a Great Notion - (1971)
One of my favorite Pauline Kael quotes was about the lame Paul Newman service comedy “The Secret War of Harry Frigg” (not to be confused with the lame Charlton Heston service comedy The Private War of Major Benson or Frank Tashlin’s sad swan song The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell). Where Kael asked with witty incredulity about Newman’s directorial aspirations, “How can somebody who wants to direct, work with Jack Smight twice?” (Smight was admittedly a hack, but also admittedly I do enjoy a few films, Traveling Executioner, Fast Break, and his TV movie The Longest Night which I shamelessly ripped off for both Kill Bill Vol 2 & my CSI episode which was ironically edited by his son Alec Smight). But to direct is what Newman wanted. And interestingly enough it wasn’t movies starring him he wanted to make. He wanted to deal with harsh emotional material (mostly theatrical adaptations) that he never sought to appear in. In a way he was like a theatrical material oriented John Cassavetes, crafting intense emotional experiences that struck most audiences as cruel endurance tests more then entertainment (especially The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds, which powerful as it is, plays like emotional child torture porn). As well as, like Cassavetes, crafting bravura performances for his wife Joanne Woodward (considered at the time one of America’s finest actresses). And speaking of at the time, Newman after 1969’s Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid was at the height of his second wave of movie star popularity. He had been voted in 1969 & 1970 the number one box office star in America. But as opposed to his two Woodward led passion projects (Rachel, Rachel & Gamma Rays) the movie adaptation of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion was a starring vehicle that became a directorial job after he fired the original director Richard (Fuzz) Colla (that’s how Brando ended up directing One-Eyed Jacks, by firing Kubrick. Sidney Poitier fired Joseph Sargent from Buck and the Preacher then took his place. And Clint Eastwood fired Philip Kaufman from The Outlaw Josey Wales and assumed the helm. Now the DGA won’t let stars or producers do that anymore). Sometimes a Great Notion is a good somewhat compromised movie, that is justly famous for one of the greatest scenes in early seventies cinema. Most of the fervent admirers of Kesey’s novel find, except for that scene, the movie a rather lackadaisical adaptation of their favorite book. But most of us who only know the material from Newman’s movie, that scene alone is enough to make it a classic of its era.
Newman tells the story of the Stamper’s, a family outfit of loggers (lumberjacks) in the woods of Oregon. The family is led figuratively by wounded loudmouth patriarch Henry Fonda, and literally by oldest beer drinking son Newman. In contrast to hateful Fonda and surly Newman, is younger brother Richard Jaeckel who’s by far the friendliest member of the family (how he ever held on to this sunny disposition in this brood of brutes is never dealt with in the film). Newman focuses on two storylines. The Stamper’s bitter feud with everybody else in the community, who are locked in a strike against the larger logging companies. But the logger union has no jurisdiction over maverick family outfits like the Stamper’s. And the Stamper’s have no loyalty to the socialist pinko unions, as Fonda refers to them. So while the desperate striking union loggers are suffering without work or pay, the Stamper’s continue cutting trees, and fulfilling contracts that allow the logging bosses to persevere through the strike. As the film goes on the resentment of the Stamper’s neighbors turns from exasperation to desperation to outright bitter hatred. And the insistence of the Stamper’s family motto: Never give a inch, goes from family pride, to hostel indifference, to go fuck yourself, Charlie obstinance. This is the films real story. And except for a nighttime rain drenched pow wow between the Stamper’s and the union representatives, under-dramatized. The second story is that of Fonda’s youngest son, and Newman and Jaeckel’s half brother, long haired hippyish Michael Sarrazin, returning after years away and the suicide of his mother, to the family household and business for reasons that remain mysterious.
Whatever star quality Sarrazin had in the late sixties and early seventies (he was almost Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy), had completely disappeared by the end of the decade (though he’s surprising effective in a supporting role in Lewis Teague’s vigilante opus Fighting Back). But Sarrazin, with his sexy shaggy hair and dark glasses is absolutely gorgeous in Notion, and gives Newman a run for his money in the sex appeal department. But Sarrazin being gorgeous isn’t a surprise, what’s surprising is how effective he is in this cast of heavyweights. You completely buy him as a surly selfish Stamper.
A good thirty five percent of the film is magnificent footage of the Stamper’s cutting down huge majestic trees, shot by second unit master Michael Moore, that go along way to explaining who the Stamper’s are. As Newman tells Sarrazin, about what they do, “It’s hard work, it ain’t much fun, but we’re pretty good at it.”
A third storyline, only marginally dealt with, is an impressively beautiful Lee Remick as Newman’s marginalized wife, who’s come to see the Stamper’s for what they are. She’s also the only one to see the hollowness of that family motto: Never give an inch.
Why not?
Would giving an inch be so terrible?
What can you afford, if you can’t afford to give an inch?
Again, this is only dramatized in the margins. There even is a half- hearted attempt to create a three-way love triangle between Newman, Remick, and Sarrazin that is utterly unconvincing. But competing storylines aside, the whole film seems compromised from its original intention. Sequences seem slapdashly truncated. Many scenes either start way too deep in, or end abruptly short. You get the feeling a good portion of the material in the novel that would give the story resonance, is left out. This isn’t an attempt to turn a great novel into a equally great film. It’s simply an effort to take the material in the novel and fashion a movie out of it. The problem lies in the fact that the actors do such a good job creating the family dynamic of these selfish hard heads, you wish the production attacked the material from the outset with more ambition.
But then…there’s that scene.
THAT FUCKING SCENE!
That scene where journeyman actor Richard Jaeckel (who I’ve watched easily over a hundred times in movies and TV shows) after a lifetime spent playing secondary characters in genre films, is allowed a show stopping duet with the biggest movie star of his era. And in this sequence, Jaeckel and Newman are perfect. After a lifetime of westerns and war films Jaeckel received an Academy Award Nomination for best supporting actor for his performance at the 1971 edition of the Academy Awards (he lost to Ben Johnson that year in The Last Picture Show).
Like the Russian roulette sequence in The Deer Hunter, and the sodomy sequence in Deliverance, or the warehouse Mexican stand off in 8 Million Ways to Die, suddenly the film turns into Opera.
What does that mean?
I dunno. It’s just me trying to express how large the film suddenly becomes. As incomplete as Sometimes a Great Notion is, that fucking scene is one of Paul Newman’s greatest accomplishments.
Newman was probably the least emotionally demonstrative of the American great actors. After his early method performances (his performance as Billy the Kid in The Left Handed Gun is a caricature of bad fifties method acting), Newman avoided big displays of anguished emotion. Anger, yes, anguish, no. He preferred to fester his emotions on the inside, trusting we could see through the mask of his handsome face. He had no taste for scenery chewing, unless in the service of comedy (the poker game in The Sting, trying to turn himself into Warren Oates in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, his underrated turn as vainglorious charlatan in Buffalo Bill and The Indians). And he didn’t need histrionics. Newman drinking a mug of beer as he plays pinball during the opening of The Verdict is more evocative then most actors highlight reels. But during that fucking scene, Newman allows both him and us (the audience who’ve watched him for these last eighteen years) a very rare demonstration of anguish. What makes it doubly meaningful, is as rare as it was for Newman the actor, it was an even rarer display of human emotion from his stonehearted Stamper character. In that way, you could say, Newman the artist identified with the Stamper motto of Never Give An Inch. In the story, Stamper realizes the cost of living by that maxim. But Newman the artist and we his adoring audience, experience the cathartic release of Paul Newman giving an inch.