Sometimes a Great Notion

Ken Kesey always gave me the impression that he was a kind of self-promoting wannabe. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the chops, it just felt like he tried a little too hard to keep up with other people whose antics, for better or worse, were a little more organic.
Paul Newman in Sometimes a Great Notion was a little too cool for school. He never seemed to believe he was the real deal. That particular movie was gut-wrenching. I only ever saw it in black and white and edited for TV so until last night I didn’t know how many ways it was almost too close to home. One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest worked me over almost as bad. I never could sign off on Jack Nicholson as a really fine actor because of that movie. I’d actually been to Dammasch State Hospital as a child, visiting a relative. What were my parents thinking? No place for a kid. A friend and I were comparing notes one day and they had a similar experience with the place. The real stories are never going to make it into the movies.
And back to the movie about loggers. My grandfather was a sawyer, not a gyppo logger, and not in Oregon, but I grew up in Oregon and Henry Fonda did actually look sort of like my Granddad except with no Bulgarian accent and my Grandfather was way more fit than Henry Fonda. His life had been tough and he was more than a little out of his element raising his own “Hank” who was softer and an only child. Hank didn’t stay in the woods very long. The Korean War and college were going to steer him away from that kind of life. I would have liked to see that movie again with my father. I have a lot of questions.

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