Sometimes a great notion movie images how to#

Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce-and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir-the actual river falls five hundred feet. Then, through bear-berry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. “The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting. come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River. “Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range.

Sometimes a great notion movie images how to#

It’s so cinematic and so poetic that it would make a cameraman jealous – how to compete with this? The opening of the novel makes the reader tremble – it’s so vivid that it almost ( almost) veers into the purple, but it never falls over that edge. Newman really digs into the logging sequences, the very specific and tough labor of logging, and they’re spectacular, visceral – these long sequences of working speak more powerfully than dialogue ever could.Īdapting this story from Ken Kesey’s monumental, experimental and brilliant novel (not discussed enough these days, much like Newman’s movie), screenwriter John Gay must have felt the pressure of Kesey’s prose – one wonders if he felt it could crush him, like attempting to adapt Faulkner. Wrapping the PNW around this family (the Stampers, led by Henry Fonda’s cantankerous Henry and Newman’s Hank, a goddamn-you-all independent logging clan with their own company, devoid of unions and who work during a strike…), Newman takes his time with scenes showing early morning boat rides, ocean touch football turned to fistfights, rain-soaked discussions on sturdy porches built for the dampness and logging. The film was shot in Lincoln County, Oregon and around the Oregon Coast – Kernville, Newport, Yaquina Bay, the Yaquina River – and Newman (with cinematographer Richard Moore) makes this green-gorgeous, stunningly imposing, feral landscape central, deeply embedded in the character’s bones. But the beauty’s not so simple – there’s the dampness, the rugged terrain, all that rain, the danger, the expanse and the isolation – this is an environment that has merged with the bodies of these characters and what they do – they are so intimately connected to the trees, that they climb them and cling to them and they cut them down. The opening begins in a setting so lyrical, lovely, scary and important to the story, to who these people are, and what affects their lives, that it’s fundamental, it’s their lifeblood. It could be a typical establishing moment – here we are in the fictional Wakonda, Oregon where our characters, loggers, reside. Those who want to experience the one-of-a-kind sequence in its entirety can watch it below.Paul Newman’s Sometimes a Great Notion opens with pine trees and the roaring ocean and with Charley Pride singing over the wet, green Pacific Northwest prettiness and it’s so gorgeous that you can practically touch and smell a time and a place, almost now past. This scene should have been emotionally horrific enough to completely replace 'quicksand' as the most terrifying slow-death imaginable, but somehow it doesn’t come up all that often. You see Richard's face 4 inches under water as he slowly dies.The scene had a very powerful effect on me, and that's why I never became a logger.'Īnd see, I never became a logger because I’m lazy and I’d have to move.

He claims the log has pinned his butt underwater.At first, he laughs at the absurdity of the situation - they both have a good laugh, until they realize the logs are rotating him, and he's being dragged underwater.Eventually, his entire body is underwater, and Paul Newman's character has to give him oxygen to breathe orally - it's a macabre mixture of humor, pathos, brotherly love and oral sex.

Sometimes a Great Notion was written by Ken Kesey, and starred Paul Newman & Richard Jaeckel as brothers.During a logging sequence where they are floating the giant timbers to the saw mill, Jaeckel's character falls between two of the massive redwoods and he gets stuck. The first and most powerful scene that comes to mind is from one of my favorite films, which wasn't a great success. I've been asked to write about my favorite death scene from a movie.