Composer Henry Mancini’s bluegrass score practically frolics, while Newman’s irrepressible charms endow Hank Stamper with righteous irascibility, as he chainsaws union desks in half and essentially leaves Wakonda to rot while on strike. The Stamper house, built by Universal Studios on the Siletz River near Kernville, is more attractive than the novel’s half-drowned monument to stubbornness. Meanwhile, Kesey bestows Oregon nature with an almost alien power to inspire and madden the Stampers.īy comparison, much of the film’s ambience is almost jaunty, as though the production couldn’t help but be impressed with its own riches of talent, source material and location. In the space of one page, the reader might plunge through three timelines of genealogy and perspective with unfilmable fluidity. In Kesey’s opus, both the setting and style are torrential. The film opens as though washed landward by the Pacific, an aerial shot combing the Central Oregon coastline while country music groundbreaker Charley Pride croons the gospel sentiments of “All His Children.” As establishing shots go, they seldom get more stunning, but we immediately see the movie veer in its own tonal direction. The Stampers have turned scab in the face of a timber strike, and one need only consult the family motto-”never give a inch”-to understand why they’ll keep on cutting, dammit. That, or maybe Paul Newman bought your uncle a beer in Newport during the summer of 1970, per the myriad boozy stories surrounding the film shoot.įifty years old this month, this Paul Newman-directed drama unravels the pathological grit of the Stamper clan, a family of loggers in the fictional coastal enclave of Wakonda, Oregon. With One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (based on another Kesey novel, of course) ranking among the state’s most famous film productions, only devotees of Oregon film history or ‘70s cinema likely recall much about Notion the movie. While Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion is regarded as perhaps the quintessential Oregon novel, its 1971 film adaptation is more like a forgotten little brother. And you have to stand back in awe of the man’s ability to create character.Sometimes a Great Notion (Biggest Trailer Database) By Chance Solem-Pfeifer Decemat 9:00 pm PST you cannot help but admire Kesey’s vigor, his profligate command of the language. Set against the damp and brutal background of an Oregon logging community, the book by turns gasps, pants, whoops, and shrieks. Kesey in the fullness of his material discovers them for us.” Beyond the PTA and the beer commercials, beyond the huge effluvium of the times, exist people who live by the ancient passions, and Mr. “ Sometimes a Great Notion, a big book in every way, captures the tenor of the post-Korea America as nothing I can remember reading. When Kesey describes the Canada honkers flying over the woods you can almost see them when he describes the smells of the grass and the tastes of the strawberries you feel and you smell and you taste.” and then there is that great gift for comedy, for purely sensational writing. Getting into this book is getting into a fascinating, crazy world of a fascinating, crazy family which has a throbbing reality and a desperate dedication to living. “As in Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey brings to life people you will never forget. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Out of the Stamper family’s rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nestįollowing the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls “one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century.” This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast.
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