Ken Kesey

(On Cable TV, October 2022) Sometimes a great scene sneaks into an otherwise humdrum movie, and you won’t find many better cases of this than Sometimes a Great Notion. This rough-and-tough drama about a union-busting logging family is a generally middle-of-the-road affair for most of its running time. Paul Newman (who also directs) and Henry Fonda occasionally raise the level of the production through their charm, along with credible cinematography to portray the reality of circa-1970 logging in the Pacific Northwest. (I was reminded of Howard Hawks’s Come and Get it.)  Adapted from a novel by Ken Kesey, the story is often episodic—the lives and loves of a tight-knit family up against the work. I still can’t square how Newman and Fonda, both of them known for left-leaning politics, would go along with anti-union protagonists, but never mind—the showcase sequence in the film is a nightmarish drawn-out death sequence that is engineered to make you believe that it will end well in extremis, but merely prolongs the agony of a character stuck in a horrifyingly deadly predicament. The scene doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the film, but it’s easily the one reason (along with another earlier sequence showing the lumberjacks at work) that the film is worth a watch… if you can handle the intensity of the material. Otherwise, the film often finds refuge in facile “rugged heroes against incompetent enemies” shtick, with the film’s last moments being a crude and macabre illustration of that credo. Classic Hollywood fans will appreciate two late-career turns for Fonda and Lee Remick, even if the rest of the film is pure audience-alienating New Hollywood. I’m not that impressed by Sometimes a Great Notion, but it’s not often that I watch a scene and go” Yeah, this is going to stick in mind longer than I’d want.”