Sometimes a Great Notion | |
---|---|
Directed by | Paul Newman |
Screenplay by | John Gay |
Based on | Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey |
Produced by | John Foreman |
Starring | |
Cinematography | Richard Moore |
Edited by | Bob Wyman |
Music by | Henry Mancini |
Production company | Newman-Foreman Company |
Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release date |
|
Running time | 113 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Box office | $4 million (US/ Canada rentals) [1] |
Sometimes a Great Notion (a.k.a.Never Give A Inch[ sic ] on some commercial television broadcasts) is a 1971 American drama film directed by Paul Newman and starring Newman, Henry Fonda, Michael Sarrazin and Lee Remick. The cast also includes Richard Jaeckel in an Academy Award-nominated performance.
The screenplay by John Gay is based on the 1964 novel of the same name by Ken Kesey, the first of his books to be adapted for the screen. Filmed in western Oregon during the summer of 1970, it was released over a year later in December 1971. [2] [3] [4] [5]
The economic stability of fictional Wakonda, Oregon, is threatened when the local logging union calls a strike against a large lumber conglomerate. When independent logger Hank Stamper and his father Henry are urged to support the strikers, they refuse, and the townspeople consider them traitors. All of the Stampers live in one compound, including Henry's good-natured nephew Joe Ben.
Hank struggles to keep the small family business alive and consequently widens the rift between himself and his complacent wife Viv, who wants him to put an end to the territorial struggle but is resigned to his doing things as he sees fit. Also complicating matters is Leland "Lee" Stamper, Henry's youngest son and Hank's half-brother, who returns home with a college education and experience in urban living. A heavy drinker, Lee eventually reveals he attempted suicide after his mother killed herself and has been suffering from deep depression ever since. He urges the neglected Viv to leave.
Despite the fact that he is uncomfortable living with a family he barely knows, Lee joins forces with them when they are forced to battle both the locals, who have burned their equipment, and the elements, which threaten their efforts to transport their logs downriver. After aiding their adversaries when their lives are in peril, the Stampers are handed two calamities at once, a falling tree that severs Henry's arm, and a trunk that crushes Joe Ben in shallow water.
Lee takes his father to the hospital, while Joe Ben laughs at his own predicament until the tree trunk rolls atop him, pinning him down. Hank's desperate rescue attempts fail as the tide rises, drowning Joe Ben. At the hospital, Henry dies after finally expressing his approval of Lee, who informs Hank that Viv has left him. Hank returns to an empty home and appears for a while to have given up. Ultimately, he decides to deliver the logs, alone if necessary, but Lee joins him. Lining up along the riverbank, the Stampers' rivals look forward to seeing them fail, but the brothers are successful. Henry's severed arm is attached to the boat, giving the middle finger to all who watch.
Although both Sam Peckinpah and Budd Boetticher had expressed interest in bringing Ken Kesey's novel to the screen, Richard A. Colla was signed to direct the film in May 1970. Five weeks after principal photography began, Colla left the project due to "artistic differences over photographic concept", as well as a required throat operation. At the same time, leading man Paul Newman broke his ankle, and the production shut down on July 29. As co-executive producer, Newman considered replacing Colla with George Roy Hill, who declined the offer, so when filming resumed two weeks later, Newman was directing as well as acting. [2] [7]
The fictional community of Wakonda was filmed in various locations in Lincoln County along the Oregon Coast. [8] [9] These included Kernville and other locations along the Siletz River, as well as Yaquina Bay, the Yaquina River, and the city of Newport, where several scenes were filmed in Mo's Shanty Fish House.
The film's theme song, "All His Children", with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and music by Henry Mancini, is performed by Charley Pride.
The film was one of the first two programs (after a New York Rangers–Vancouver Canucks NHL game) and the first movie presentation to be broadcast by Home Box Office (HBO) when the pay television network launched in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on November 8, 1972, [10] airing less than two years after its initial theatrical release. [11] When it was finally aired on commercial television in 1977, it was retitled Never Give A Inch[ sic ], a reference to the Stamper family philosophy. [7]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "an extremely interesting, if impure (happily impure, I might add) example of a genre of action film that flourished in the 1930s in movies about tuna fishermen, bush pilots, high-wire repairmen and just about any physical pursuit you can think of . . . As in Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings , these films are, at their best, considerably less simple-minded than they sound—being expressions of lives lived almost entirely in terms of rugged, essentially individualistic professionalism . . . Mr. Newman . . . has been remarkably successful both in creating vivid, quite complicated characters and in communicating the sense of beautiful idiocy that is the strength of the two older Stampers. As he showed in Rachel, Rachel , Mr. Newman knows how to direct actors . . . [His] handling of the logging and action sequences . . . is also surprisingly effective, not because of any contemporary fanciness but because of what looks like a straight-forward confidence in the subject. My only real objection to the film, I think, is a certain impatience with the screenplay, which lumberingly sets up almost a very physical and emotional crisis that can (and, indeed, must) erupt before this kind of movie can be said to have decently met its obligations." [5]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film three out of four stars and described Newman as "a director of sympathy and a sort of lyrical restraint. 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." [12]
Quentin Tarantino called it "a good somewhat compromised movie, that is justly famous for one of the greatest scenes in early seventies cinema... 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." [13]
The film has a rating of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. [14]
Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
Academy Awards | Best Supporting Actor | Richard Jaeckel | Nominated | [15] |
Best Song – Original for the Picture | "All His Children" Music by Henry Mancini; Lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman | Nominated |
On the evening of November 8, 1972, Sometimes a Great Notion was the first film to be broadcast on Home Box Office. [16]
On December 18, 2012, Shout! Factory released the film on Blu-ray for the first time. [17]
Ken Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
Henry Jaynes Fonda was an American actor whose career spanned five decades on Broadway and in Hollywood. On screen and stage, he often portrayed characters who embodied an everyman image.
Paul Leonard Newman was an American actor, film director, racing car driver, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Silver Bear, a Cannes Film Festival Award, and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
The Merry Pranksters were followers of American author Ken Kesey. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally at Kesey's homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus called Furthur, organizing parties, and giving out LSD. During this time they met many of the guiding lights of the 1960s cultural movement and presaged what are commonly thought of as hippies with odd behavior, tie-dyed and red, white, and blue clothing, and renunciation of normal society, which they dubbed The Establishment. Tom Wolfe chronicled their early escapades in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, including a bit on the same epic 1964 cross-country trip on Furthur - a sojourn to Houston, stopping to visit Kesey's friend the novelist Larry McMurtry.
Furthur is a 1939 International Harvester school bus purchased by author Ken Kesey in 1964 to carry his "Merry Band of Pranksters" cross-country, filming their counterculture adventures as they went. The bus featured prominently in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but, due to the chaos of the trip and editing difficulties, footage of the journey was not released as a film until the 2011 documentary Magic Trip.
Richard Jaeckel was an American actor of film and television. Jaeckel became a well-known character actor in his career, which spanned six decades. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor with his role in the 1971 adaptation of Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.
Slim is a 1937 American romantic drama film directed by Ray Enright and starring Pat O'Brien, Henry Fonda and Margaret Lindsay. It is sometimes (incorrectly) called Slim the Lineman. The picture is a film adaptation of the 1934 novel Slim by William Wister Haines, which concerns linemen in the electric power industry. The supporting cast features Jane Wyman.
Doc Hollywood is a 1991 American romantic comedy film directed by Michael Caton-Jones and written by Daniel Pyne along with Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman, based on Neil B. Shulman's book What? Dead...Again? The film stars Michael J. Fox, Julie Warner, Barnard Hughes, Woody Harrelson, David Ogden Stiers, Frances Sternhagen, and Bridget Fonda.
Michael Sarrazin was a Canadian actor. His most notable film was They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.
Jonathan Raymond, usually credited Jon Raymond, is an American writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is best known for writing the novels The Half-Life and Rain Dragon, and for writing the short stories and novels adapted for the films Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and First Cow, all directed by Kelly Reichardt, with whom he co-wrote the screenplays.
Stamper is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Kernville is an unincorporated community in Lincoln County, Oregon, United States. It is located near the intersection of U.S. Route 101 and Oregon Route 229, where the Siletz River enters Siletz Bay. There are two communities, known as "old" and "new" Kernville, in close proximity. Old Kernville is considered a ghost town.
Sometimes a Great Notion is the second novel by American author Ken Kesey, published in 1964. While One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) is more famous, many critics consider Sometimes a Great Notion Kesey's magnum opus. The story involves an Oregon family of gyppo loggers who cut trees for a local mill in opposition to unionized workers who are on strike.
Mo's Restaurants is an American restaurant chain located on the Oregon Coast and headquartered in Newport, Oregon. Mo's are named after their original owner Mohava "Mo" Niemi, who was once described as "the stuff of legend in Newport".
Caverns is a 1989 novel written collaboratively as an experiment by Ken Kesey and a creative writing class that he taught at the University of Oregon. The cover of the book says it was written by O.U. Levon—the name of this supposed author, spelled backwards, is "novel U.O.". The full list of authors is: Robert Blucher, Ben Bochner, James Finley, Jeff Forester, Bennett Huffman, Lynn Jeffress, Ken Kesey, Neil Lidstrom, H. Highwater Powers, Jane Sather, Charles Varani, Meredith Wadley, Lidia Yukman and Ken Zimmerman.
Melissa Stewart Newman, also known as Lissy Newman, is an American artist, singer and former actress who appeared in the 1990 film Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, and at the 30th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards.
Richard Anthony Colla, sometimes credited as Dick Colla, was an American film and television director and actor.
Lee Quarnstrom was an American journalist, executive editor of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Magazine, and a Beatnik. He was a core member of the Merry Band of Pranksters, a group loosely led by novelist Ken Kesey.
The Storyteller, also known as the Ken Kesey Memorial, is an outdoor bronze sculpture by Pete Helzer, installed at Kesey Square in Eugene, Oregon, in the United States. Unveiled in 2003, it depicts American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure Ken Kesey reading to his three grandchildren, Kate Smith, Caleb Kesey and Jordan Smith. Plaques on the base of the sculpture contain excerpts from Kesey's novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964).