Thanks to Publicola, I watched the 1970 movie version of Sometimes A Great Notion last night. (It was directed by Paul Newman and stars Newman alongside Henry Fonda.) It is not a perfect film—in part because it’s far less dark, complex, and violent than the Ken Kesey novel that it’s based on — but it gets some things really right. You see virgin timber fall to chainsaws and you see the rainwashed streets of a forgotten hamlet on the Oregon Coast.
Like the book, the film is rooted in a bygone Northwest, one that was vanishing even at the time when the movie was made. On the surface, it’s about guys who are tougher than you—guys who get up at 4:30 in the morning to set choker all day; who drink Olympia beer from tin cans; and who fight more or less for the fun of it. (On that score, Henry Fonda steals almost every scene he’s in.) But underneath that, it’s about a place and a way of life that was changing forever. There were elements that gave me chills.
I’m too young to have done more than glimpsed that chapter in the region’s history, yet there was something eerily familiar about the scenes and characters who could only have inhabited this corner of the world. Perhaps it’s because, before I came along, my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all worked in the logging industry of southern Oregon. But I suspect that anyone who knows and loves the Northwest would be absorbed by the movie.
Unfortunately, the hard part is actually finding the darn thing. It’s playing for two more nights at the Grand Illusion in Seattle’s University District. I can’t find it on Netflix, but I suspect some of the better independent video stores around the Northwest could track it down for you.
Dan
I am familiar with where the movie was filmed. The small town hamlet you talk about was Toledo, Oregon. The drowning scene with Joe Ben was Yaquina bay and the Stamper house is located about 3 miles up from the mouth of the Siletz river in Oregon. You can still see the house from the road. The covered bridge that was filmed is in Chitwood, up the Yaquina river a few miles.
SF
I saw it in ’73 in Happy Camp, CA. I remember people thought that “Never Give an Inch” was the film title. That was three or four years before I heard of spotted owls.
Eric de Place
Wikipedia has a brief discussion about the movie’s actual name:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sometimes_a_Great_Notion_(film).The version I saw was advertised as “Sometimes A Great Notion,” but the opening credits called it, “Never Given An Inch” (which apparently came from HBO’s rebroadcast of the film, not the original). Slightly more curious, the Stamper family motto is actually the ungrammatical, “Never Give A Inch,” which is seen several times during the film engraved in a piece of wood.
Ten Bears
My hands are in that movie – settin’ a choker. The ‘piece of wood’ Eric refers to is/was actually a Jesus with lambs plaque admonishing ‘blessed are the meek’, which the old man (Henry) painted over with yellow log branding paint, scrawled in red log marking crayon ‘never give an inch’, and nailed to the wall ore Hank’s crib. The plaque was sent to Hank by the old man’s father, Jonas, who dragged the family out here then abandoned them when he didn’t have what it took to whup that swamp. The old man later dumped that ‘box of old meat’ into the bay… without so much as a fair-thee-well.The original release was as Never Give An Inch.Four Generations…