Sometimes a Great Notion

Coastal Oregon in Paul Newman's 1971 movie adaptation of Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey's immense Faulkner-haunted novel, is a clean, well-lighted place, mostly sunny and clear.  The interiors of the Gothic house where the incestuous hard-nosed Stamper clan live under old Henry's ferocious patriarchy are similarly clearly lit, tidy and neat.  A sympathetic viewer readily understands this betrayal of the generally soggy and murky milieu so carefully established by Kesey's prose:  Newman has a lot of star power in this movies and audiences are paying to see his stars in action, not their shadows and profiles dimly limned in the mist and drizzle.  Newman himself plays Hank Stamper, the psychotically stubborn leader of a group of "Gyppo" loggers (most of them family members) still cutting trees notwithstanding a union strike that has put all of their neighbors out of work.  Hank's father, Old Henry (Henry Fonda) bellows commands and obscenities at this sons and cackles demonically when the boys pitch dynamite at a union rep come to negotiate with the family.  Lee Remick as Viv, Hank's neglected wife, quietly smolders.  Richard Jaeckel plays the part of the religious cousin, Joby, Hank's lieutenant in the logging business.  And Michael Sarrazin, eyes like huge poached eggs, mutters and snarls as Lee, the family's prodigal son, returned from the East after a comically failed suicide attempt -- Lee's mother has just killed herself by jumping out a window:  she was old Henry's second, much younger, wife who left the Stamper domain twelve years earlier, after a love affair with her step-son, the fourteen-year old Hank.  At first, Lee's appearance on the scene is fortuitous -- unlike the novel, he doesn't seem to have any clear plan.  But as the film progresses, conflict arises between Hank and Lee:  although this is pretty much submerged in the movie, Lee plans to return the compliment to Hank:  Hank slept with Lee's mother and Lee plans to sleep with Viv, Hank's wife. 

The film's script is ingenious and irritating -- clocking in at a taut 115 minutes (in my version the novel runs well over 700 pages), the film perforce leaves out most of the minor characters in the book and retains just the skeleton of the plot.  Just as the point when you feel compelled to "call out" some major deviation from Kesey's book, however, the film will suddenly adhere very closely to its source.  An good example occurs in the film's last minutes.  After an awful logging accident wipes out half the family, Hank sits in stubborn, picturesque isolation in his empty house.  Newman shows us several shots of the hero brooding and alone.  (Newman is at the height of his male beauty in this film.)  This is false to the novel -- in Kesey's book, set in 1961, everyone watches TV all the time;  in that regard, at least, the novel is realistic. (Even an old Indian living in a mud hut somewhere in the mountains is described as watching Have Gun Will Travel.  After the big calamity at the river, Hank is oddly passive, becalmed and watching Thanksgiving football on TV.)  Just as the point when the admirer of the novel decides to declare this inaccuracy, the film provides a shot of Newman, still brooding, but with a Tv screen flickering behind him.   This is an example of the backhanded, sometimes even half covert way, that the film references Kesey's book.  The novel's central theme, the incest between step-son and step-mother, is suppressed but, I think, more realistically managed than in the novel -- the book suggests that the 14 year old Hank is somehow the aggressor in the love affair.  Newman's approach is better:  he makes a point that the hyper-masculine Kesey avoids:  Hank says about the love affair:  "I was 14 and she was 30.  Who was banging who?"

Sometimes a Great Notion is, in effect, war novel -- instead of battles, we are shown raw combat between the Stamper clan and the forests that they cut down.  (Kesey often uses military jargon to describe logging operations.)  Accordingly, in the movie, logging sequences are the equivalent of battle scenes -- they are the fulcrum of action that tests the characters and upon which the plot hinges.  And Newman's portrayal of logging in the Pacific Northwest is wonderfully palpable, violent, and suitably spectacular -- we see vast clear cuts with enormous logs scattered at the bottom of deep, steep ravines.  Hank climbs a tree and tops it to set up a spar or central anchor for the operation -- we see him above the forests and when the top thirty feet of the tree falls down, the huge trunk tries to shake him off like a dog shaking off water.  Logs slip out of harnesses and topple like avalanches down hillsides and the climactic accident is truly horrific -- you may not be able to watch some of this without closing your eyes.  Among the clandestine admirers of logging porn, this film has a high, if secret, reputation -- apparently, when the film was released, people didn't much like it, although the picture was a big hit with lumbermen.  The sequences involving logging are wonderfully vivid and visceral and, in some respects, the screenplay improves on the novel by eliminating distractions and contriving a climax that is both pictorially impressive and better than the novel's ending in some ways.  (However, we are cheated out of the big fist fight between Hank and Lee that ends the book -- but Newman's final sequence is better, if more obvious, than the unresolved conclusion of the novel.)  The movie doesn't feel true to Kesey because it lacks the book's half-random sprawl, its choruses of minor characters, and the prevailing mood of squalid foggy and rainy despair.  Like many adaptation of well-known literary works, the movie occupies unstable terrain -- it's not exactly the like the novel and, in fact, deviates in many ways from Kesey's plot (the book's central symbol of the voracious Wakonda Auge river ripping up the foundation for the Stamper home is completely omitted).  But the movie doesn't stand on its own two feet either.  Adaptation of novels is tricky -- the most successful novel adaptation, Coppola's The Godfather basically required about five hours of screen time.  The viewer's interest in this film will depend upon how much manly activity a viewer can stand -- Newman's "soldier males" are literally armored against the world:  old Hank wears a body-cast and, as soon as he doffs that protective armor, he is literally ripped limb from limb.  The female roles are underwritten to the point of non-existence and a third of the movie is battle scenes -- albeit between man and nature.  The film's existentialism is direct and brutal -- there is no meaning in life but struggle and the struggle is ultimately completely futile and totally destructive.  Old Henry says:  "You're born, you eat, you fight, you shit, you keep on going on -- that's all there is."  The family's motto is "Never Give an Inch" and their banner is a severed arm giving the finger to the world -- an image much better deployed in the movie than in the book.  As a corrective to all this logging porn, I recommend several viewings of Monty Python's "lumberman's song"  -- "I'm a lumberman and I'm okay".