All in the Family

By JAY COCKS

In Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson wrote of "grotesques," people who took a single truth to themselves, called it theirs and tried to live by it. "It was the truths that made the people grotesques," Anderson said. Once embraced so singlemindedly, any truth "became a falsehood."

Anderson would recognize the Stamper family of Sometimes a Great Notion. "Never give a inch" is the clan motto. Their dogged nonconformity takes heed neither of political fashion nor social form. When a general strike is called among the lumbermen of their small Oregon town, the Stampers go right on working. The union pays a visit, and the head of the clan (Henry Fonda) makes congenially threatening remarks about "Commie pinkos who tell us when to cut." Replies the bookish union leader: "That's as good a statement of 19th century philosophy as I've ever heard."

If the Stampers' devotion to their own simple truth is grotesque, there is a kind of perverse glory in it too. The strike is only a challenge and a test. When the union begins to exact reprisals, the younger Stamper men (Paul Newman, Michael Sarrazin, Richard Jaeckel) reply in kind. Theirs is almost a ritual defense against the onslaughts of contemporary society. Ultimately Sometimes a Great Notion is not so much concerned with politics as with freedom and the human value of outright defiance.

Missing Vigor. Readers of the Ken Kesey novel from which John Gay's diffuse screenplay is derived will miss Kesey's vigor and his bigger-than-life characterizations. The book roared, the film sputters. But the actors do it more than justice. Sarrazin, whose past performances have been consistent only in their boredom, is at ease and quite effective as a maverick Stamper home from the big city. Jaeckel is perfect as an inveterate joker who takes only his fundamentalist religion seriously, and Newman is better than he has been in years as the favorite son who idolizes his father. Fonda, as the old man, simply beats everyone cold. He has a death scene that must stand among the best work of a lifetime filled with superb film acting.

Newman is also the director of Sometimes a Great Notion. Despite its shortcomings it is both more ambitious and more accomplished than his previous Rachel, Rachel. He seems more certain of himself here, not so recklessly inclined to expand a small moment into a crashing epiphany.

. Jay Cocks

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