It's one of those books that I am glad I 'pushed through' to finally read in completion, even though it took picking up more than a couple of times. There are seminaries I found in this novel and John Steinbeck's "East of Eden," with the struggle between two bothers, the western independent spirit of working on the land, and the plot lines that lead to tragic ending for key characters. I remember bits and pieces of the film and the All-star cast that was done in 1970-71, but the book is so much more nuanced with background and character developed. I was only reading about 30 pages or so a day until I read the last 150 in day because it finishes in such a flurry. It was hard a first to get into this book with the way Kesey wrote it, switching characters paragraph my paragraph without attribution. I picked it back up after retiring from the military. Funny thing how a book can sit on shelf for three decades. I read the first part and put it down thinking I would get back to finishing it. 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.I bought this book nearly 30 years ago when I first moved to Oregon the late summer of 1992. 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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