A nice rest in a state mental hospital beats a stretch in the pen, right? Randle P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a free-spirited con with lightning in his veins and glib on his tongue, fakes insanity and moves in with what he calls the “nuts.” Immediately, his contagious sense of disorder runs up against numbing routine. No way should guys pickled on sedatives shuffle around in bathrobes when the World Series is on. This means war! On one side is McMurphy. On the other is soft-spoken Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), among the most coldly monstrous villains in film history. At stake is the fate of every patient on the ward. Based on Ken Kesey’s acclaimed bestseller, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest swept all five major 1975 Academy Awards: Best Picture (produced by Saul Zaentz and Michael Douglas), Actor (Nicholson), Actress (Fletcher), Director (Milos Forman) and Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman). Raucous, searing and with a superb cast that includes Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd in his film debut, this one soars.
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Production Notes
Theatrical Trailer
One of the key movies of the 1970s, when exciting, groundbreaking, personal films were still being made in Hollywood, Milos Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest emphasized the humanistic story at the heart of Ken Kesey’s more hallucinogenic novel. Jack Nicholson was born to play the part of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the rebellious inmate of a psychiatric hospital who fights back against the authorities’ cold attitudes of institutional superiority, as personified by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). It’s the classic antiestablishment tale of one man asserting his individuality in the face of a repressive, conformist system–and it works on every level. Forman populates his film with memorably eccentric faces, and gets such freshly detailed and spontaneous work from his ensemble that the picture sometimes feels like a documentary. Unlike a lot of films pitched at the “youth culture” of the 1970s, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest really hasn’t dated a bit, because the qualities of human nature that Forman captures–playfulness, courage, inspiration, pride, stubbornness–are universal and timeless. The film swept the Academy Awards for 1976, winning in all the major categories (picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay) for the first time since Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night in 1931. –Jim Emerson
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March 8, 2008
#1
I will never watch this film. I’ve always been a fan of Jack’s movies. However, I will never watch this film simply because I know that it will never measure up to the book.
March 8, 2008
#2
This is one of my favourite films starring Jack Nicholson. One generalised thing that gets me is that a lot of the people I know haven’t seen it. Believe me, it’s a classic.
Jack plays McMurphy, a new edition to a mental institute. This is due to a rape and five charges of assault. About ten minutes into the film, when McMurphy’s talking to the doctor about why he’s there, McMurphy says ‘I think we ought to get to the bottom of RP McMurphy’. This certainly happens by the end of the film.
OFOACN (it’s as difficult to abbreviate the title as it is to write it out) is plainly shot but smooth. The colouring is bleak and drab. It’s like when you come out of a cinema, where you’ve just seen a special effects film, and you see the colour of real life.
It’s a film about breaking the rules (like Brando’s The Wild One) but it’s also hilarious. It’s difficult to concentrate on the meaning because the film is so enjoyable to watch. In my opinion, OFOACN is questioning sanity. How can you class people as insane when it’s so difficult to describe sanity? Hell, just look around you.
Over the years, you can watch it again and again. Frankly if you’re interested in film and don’t see this you must be insane.
March 8, 2008
#3
This is the worst of the Danny DeVito comedies released in the mid-80s, and is far, far inferior to funnier flicks like “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “Ruthless People,” and “Other People’s Money.” Compared to them, this one is a comic stinker.
The premise is a good one– a couple of wackos played by Danny DeVito, Jack Nicholson, Christopher Lloyd, and an Indian perform hijinks in an asylum and they plot to break out. The laughs, however, are few and far between and at times the only things that are funny are Jack Nicholson’s hat and the fact that Michael Douglas directed this.
My biggest problem is that Jack Nicholson, who is great as The Joker (Batman), the Devil (The Witches of Eastwick) and a Wolf (Wolf) isn’t very gifted at comedy. Imagine how much crazier it would have been if the crazy people were led by somebody like Tim Allen or Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan!
There is some funny business with a water fountain and a pillow at the end of the movie, but too little too late, if you ask me. Only rent this movie if you hate laughter.
March 8, 2008
#4
I don’t understand why so many people love this movie. The acting waspretty mediocre, except for Jack Nichelson but I simply did not likehis character. Nurse Ratched was also dissapointing. People writehow evil she is, but I feel that she was just a strait laced women trying to keep the mental ward patients behaved. I don’t understand where “evil” came from. . . Any person would want to spread the gossip, especilaly when there was such a chaotic situation at hand. I just do not understand why this movie is so big. It is slow paced, not funny, does not really contain great drama, and the directing and pictire quality was horrible. How a film so terribly editing and filmed could win best directing is beyong my imagination. Personally, I liked the recent Girl Interrupted allot better. There was allot more emotion, Lisa(Angeline Jolie) was more evil than Ratched(also three dimensional) , the suicide was more suspenful, and there was allot more emotion. Winona Ryder is sympathetic, Jack is not really. This is just a sloppy tyrant movie, that does not portray mental institutions correctly(I know., I was in one 6 years ago). Watch Girl Interrupted for a much more honest, realistic portrayal. And why didn’t anyone mention how annoying most of the characters are?
March 8, 2008
#5
Like so many Hollywood movies — especially anything made after the late 60s, when America’s teen-agers and collegiate students started taking their typically youthful antiestablishmentarianism with them into the future — this is another passionate rage against the allegedly oppressive machine. See The Shawshank Redemption, see Dead Poet’s Society, see With Honors — filmdom’s lock-step march against authority is a mainstay of the past three or four decades. Naturally, this movie is revered as something of a paragon if not a modern pioneer of the trend. In regular Hollywood fashion, Nurse Ratched (the chief antagonist) and the cuckoos’ restrictive environment are portrayed with just enough ambiguity to deflect charges that the movie is a paranoid feast for leftist sensibilities — which it is, of course. Unlike most fare of this sort, it is at least very competently crafted (the director and the actors sympathize with the source material enough to give it their all), which no doubt explains how it won one or two more of those little golden trophies than it would have gotten otherwise. — M. Cooper