The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 5-11
Sometimes a Great Notion (1970)
Directed by Paul Newman
Paul Newman was every kind of sweaty, hapless drifter America had to offer. He played our criminals, our private eyes, our gamblers, our downtrodden lawyers, our beleaguered cops, and every other imaginable sort of schemer or dreamer. One of his finest roles is that of the logger hero, suitably dug in like a tick on the flesh of a fading industry, in Sometimes a Great Notion, taken from the Ken Kesey book. Like Kesey’s McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Newman’s Hank Stamper knows there may be an easier way to live, but he refuses the easy way because goddamnit that’s for people who don’t know what suffering’s like. He won’t throw in the towel just because the world keeps pushing him. Newman, brothers Michael Sarazin and Richard Jaekel and father Henry Fonda eke out their grubby living like one group of trees waiting to be cut down. When the ax falls, it cuts deep, resulting in one of the most painful, honest scenes of death you’ll ever witness. Newman didn’t direct often but when he did he meant it. Sometimes A Great Notion takes a little of your blood with it when it’s gone. You’ll feel like you’ve lost a year of living watching Newman decide whether to get up again when life pushes him the hardest its ever pushed. Scout Tafoya (April 7, 5:15pm, 9:30pm at Metrograph’s “Universal in the 70s: Part Two”)