Word: sarrazin
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There is no reason to expect it, but a remarkable scene occurs somewhere in the middle of this befogged exercise. An old woman named Anne Ives plays the mother of a murdered man who has been reincarnated inside Michael Sarrazin. Now Sarrazin himself has some doubts about this nagging notion of double identity. It afflicts him, for one thing, with an annoying case of déjà vu, which recurs like a migraine. Quite understandably, he would prefer not to be lieve that he is a gentleman who distressed a great many young ladies some decades ago. There...
...must also be said, however, that her appearance takes up about two minutes of what is otherwise a woeful enterprise. The nominal stars of the show, besides the zealously mediocre Sarrazin, are Jennifer O'Neill, who always looks freshly daubed, Margot Kidder, who drinks heavily and masturbates in the bathtub, and Cornelia Sharpe, struggling to speak words over a single syllable. Ives is perhaps a half-century older than these women, but they do not have a thing...
Here she plays a Brooklyn housewife named Henrietta, whose cab-driver husband Pete (Michael Sarrazin) is 32 years old and still trying to pull himself through college. One early summer's day, Pete's dispatcher down at the garage passes along a hot commodities-market tip: a trade deal with the Russians will make the price of pork bellies go through the roof come July. All Pete needs is $3,000 capital. He is without much enterprise (let it not be forgotten that Michael Sarrazin is not the star of this movie), so Henrietta goes...
...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...