Milos Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is based on Ken Kesey’s novel by the same title. It was the first film ever to receive all five most sought after Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best screenplay, best leading actor and best leading actress in that year. McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson) is a prisoner who is sent from the work farm to an asylum to determine whether his rebelliousness is attributable to insanity. He starts a quiet revolution amongst some of the asylum’s inmates. He makes a bet to taunt and bring down head Nurse Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher) who rules the ward with an iron fist. At first it is all fun and games, but it ultimately takes a turn for the worst.
The film takes one on a roller coaster of emotions, from laughing out loud to worrying empathy, from becoming enraged to shedding some tears. McMurphy might be a convicted felon, but his charismatic personality quickly wins over the audience as well as the inmates. Even though he does many irresponsible and questionable things, he reveals attributes which are quite endearing. One finds oneself rooting for him when he breaks the rules. He breaks the rigid and oppressive monotony of the inmates’ lives and becomes the object of their entertainment and amusement. But as in all dictatorships, this is short-lived.
Louise Fletcher gives a wonderful performance as the head nurse, who is very clinical, cold, unbending, rational and disconcertingly calm – quite the antithesis of McMurphy. It is quite disturbing how patients are subdued through medication and treatment methods such as shock therapy. The film gives a voice to those who are oppressed through any system or establishment of power.
The author of the novel, Ken Kesey, reportedly did not want to watch the film seeing that his novel is told through the eyes of Chief Bromden, while the film is told through McMurphy’s eyes. It would indeed have been quite a different film if the movie had been closer to Kesey’s book. I have not read the book yet, and, therefore, cannot say whether I would have preferred one or the other and why. But what I can concede, is that the film is poignant exactly for the fact that Murphy is the protagonist; it shows just how powerful tyranny can be in destroying the mightiest spirits.
SPOILER WARNING! The word “cuckoo” is slang for a crazy or foolish person. But its main meaning is that of a bird who lays its eggs in the nests of other species. This might refer to McMurphy who laid an egg of revolution in the asylum, which hatch out in the form of Chief Bromden breaking out of the asylum after he has been subjugated to the staff’s will. The Wikipedia contends that
…the origin of the title is often disputed, however, it is believed to come from a poem by Louis Untermeyer called “Rainbow in the Sky.”
“Wire, briar, limber-lock
Three gees in a flock
One flew east, one flew west
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”
The “one [that] flew east” is McMurphy, and the “one [that] flew west” is Nurse Ratched, illustrating their opposite directions and rivalry. “And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest” describes Chief who was able to escape the institute of mentally ill patients. It loses the significance it had in the novel, in which the line is a part of a rhyme Chief Bromden remembers from his childhood. This detail was not included in the film.
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Puritan Nurse Ratched very sadistically vows to tell Billy’s mother of his wild night with one of McMurphy’s girlfriends. There does not seem to be as much rehabilitation as oppression and suppression in the mental hospital. Chief suffocates McMurphy in the end; it is a mercy killing to rescue him from the vegetable-like state the mental hospital has put him in. SPOILERS END HERE.
Genre: Comedy / Drama
Running time: 133 min
Country: USA
Language: English
Director: Milos Forman
Writing credits: Ken Kesey (novel)
Bo Goldman (screenplay)
Lawrence Hauben (screenplay)
Producers: Michael Douglas
Martin Fink
Saul Zaentz
Cinematographer: Haskell Wexler
Bill Butler
Editor: Sheldon Kahn
Lynzee Klingman
Music: Jack Nitzsche Distributed by: United Artists Main Cast:
Randle Patrick McMurphy – Jack Nicholson
Nurse Mildred Ratched – Louise Fletcher
Dale Harding – William Redfield
Dr. John Spivey – Dean R. Brooks
Martini – Danny DeVito
Jim Sefelt – William Duell
Billy Bibbit – Brad Dourif
Max Taber – Christopher Lloyd
Chief Bromden – Will Sampson
Frederickson – Vincent Schiavelli
Attendant Washington – Nathan George
Attendant Warren – Mwako Cumbuka
Orderly Turkle – Scatman Crothers
