One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Miloš Forman
Produced by	Saul Zaentz Michael Douglas
Screenplay by	Lawrence Hauben Bo Goldman
Based on	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest  by Ken Kesey
Starring	Jack Nicholson Louise Fletcher
Music by	Jack Nitzsche
Cinematography	Haskell Wexler Bill Butler[1]
Edited by	Richard Chew[2] Sheldon Kahn Lynzee Klingman
Distributed by	United Artists
Release dates	November 19, 1975 (1975-11-19)
Running time	133 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$3 million[3]
Box office	$109 million[3]

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a 1975 American comedy-drama film directed by Miloš Forman, based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Ken Kesey, and starring Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, and Will Sampson. The supporting cast features William Redfield, Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and Scatman Crothers.

The film was the second to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor in Lead Role, Actress in Lead Role, Director, and Screenplay) following It Happened One Night in 1934, an accomplishment not repeated until 1991 by The Silence of the Lambs.

Now considered to be one of the greatest films ever made, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is No. 33 on the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies list. In 1993, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Plot

In 1963 Oregon, Randle Patrick "Mac" McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a recidivist anti-authoritarian criminal serving a short sentence on a prison farm for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl, is transferred to a mental institution for evaluation. Although he does not show any overt signs of mental illness, he hopes to avoid hard labor and serve the rest of his sentence in a more relaxed hospital environment.

McMurphy's ward is run by steely, unyielding Nurse Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who employs subtle humiliation, unpleasant medical treatments and a mind-numbing daily routine to suppress the patients. McMurphy finds that they are more fearful of Ratched than they are focused on becoming functional in the outside world. McMurphy establishes himself immediately as the leader; his fellow patients include Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif), a nervous, stuttering young man; Charlie Cheswick (Sydney Lassick), a man disposed to childish fits of temper; Martini (Danny DeVito), who is delusional; Dale Harding (William Redfield), a high-strung, well-educated paranoid; Max Taber (Christopher Lloyd), who is belligerent and profane; Jim Sefelt (William Duell), who is epileptic; and "Chief" Bromden (Will Sampson), a silent Native American of imposing stature who is believed to be deaf and mute.

McMurphy's and Ratched's battle of wills escalates rapidly. When McMurphy's card games win away everyone's cigarettes, Ratched confiscates the cigarettes and rations them out. McMurphy calls for votes on ward policy changes, to watch the World Series, to challenge her. He makes a show of betting the other patients he can escape by lifting an old hydrotherapy console, a massive marble plumbing fixture, off the floor and sending it through the window; but fails to do so.

McMurphy steals a hospital bus, herds his colleagues aboard, stops to pick up Candy (Marya Small), a party girl, and takes the group deep sea fishing on a commandeered boat. He tells them: "You're not nuts; you're fishermen!" and they begin to feel faint stirrings of self-determination.

Soon after, however, McMurphy learns that Ratched and the doctors have the power to keep him committed indefinitely. Sensing a rising tide of insurrection among the group, Ratched tightens her grip on everyone. During one of her group therapy sessions, Cheswick's agitation boils over and he, McMurphy and the Chief wind up brawling with the orderlies. They are sent up to the "shock shop" for electroconvulsive therapy. While McMurphy and the Chief wait their turn, McMurphy offers Chief a piece of gum, and Chief murmurs "Thank you...Ah, Juicy Fruit." McMurphy is delighted to find that Bromden is neither deaf nor mute, and that he stays silent to deflect attention. After the electroshock therapy, McMurphy shuffles back onto the ward feigning brain damage, before humorously animating his face and loudly greeting his fellow patients, assuring everyone that the ECT only charged him up all the more.

As the struggle with Ratched takes its toll, and with his release date no longer a certainty, McMurphy plans an escape. He phones Candy to bring her friend Rose (Louisa Moritz) and some booze to the hospital late one night. They enter through a window after McMurphy bribes the night orderly, Mr. Turkle (Scatman Crothers). McMurphy and Candy invite the patients into the day room for a Christmas party; the group breaks into the drug locker, puts on music, and celebrates. At the end of the night, McMurphy and Bromden prepare to climb out the window with the girls. McMurphy says goodbye to everyone, and invites an emotional Billy to escape with them; he declines, saying he is not yet ready to leave the hospital—though he would like to date Candy in the future. McMurphy insists Billy have sex with Candy right then and there. Billy and Candy agree and they retire to a private room. The effects of the alcohol and pilfered medication take their toll on everyone, including McMurphy and the Chief, whose eyes slowly close in fatigue.

Ratched arrives the following morning and discovers the scene: the ward completely upended and patients passed out all over the floor. She orders the attendants to lock the window, clean up, and conduct a head count. When they find Billy and Candy, the other patients applaud and, buoyed, Billy speaks for the first time without a stutter. Ratched then announces that she will tell Billy's mother what he has done. Billy panics, his stutter returns, he starts punching himself and then locks himself in the doctor's office. Locked inside, Billy kills himself. McMurphy, enraged at Ratched, chokes her nearly to death until orderly Washington knocks him out.

Some time later, the patients in the ward play cards and gamble for cigarettes as before, only now with Harding dealing and delivering a pale imitation of McMurphy's patter. Ratched, still recovering from the neck injury sustained during McMurphy's attack, wears a neck brace and speaks in a thin, reedy voice. The patients pass a whispered rumor that McMurphy dramatically escaped the hospital rather than being taken "upstairs".

Late that night, Bromden sees McMurphy being escorted back to his bed, and initially believes that he has returned so they can escape together, which he is now ready to do since McMurphy has made him feel "as big as a mountain". However, when he looks closely at McMurphy's unresponsive face, he is horrified to see lobotomy scars on his forehead. Unwilling to allow McMurphy to live in such a state, the Chief smothers McMurphy to death with his pillow. He then carries out McMurphy's escape plan by lifting the hydrotherapy console off the floor and hurling the massive fixture through a grated window. Chief climbs through the window and runs off into the distance, with Taber waking up just in time to see him escape and cheering as the others awake.

Cast

Production

Filming began in January 1975 and concluded approximately three months later,^[4] and was shot on location in Salem, Oregon and the surrounding area, as well as on the Oregon coast.^[5][6] It was also shot at Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon, which was also the setting of the novel.^[7]

Haskell Wexler was fired as cinematographer and replaced by Bill Butler. Wexler believed his dismissal was due to his concurrent work on the documentary Underground, in which the radical terrorist group The Weather Underground were being interviewed while hiding from the law. However, Miloš Forman said he had terminated Wexler over mere artistic differences. Both Wexler and Butler received Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, though Wexler said there was "only about a minute or two minutes in that film I didn’t shoot.”^[8]

According to Butler, Jack Nicholson refused to speak to Forman: "...[Jack] never talked to Milos at all, he only talked to me."^[1]

Reception

The film was met with overwhelming critical acclaim; Roger Ebert said "Miloš Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a film so good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance."^[9] Ebert would later put the film on his "Great Movies" list.^[10] A.D. Murphy of Variety wrote a mixed review as well,^[11] as did Vincent Canby: writing in The New York Times, Canby called the film "a comedy that can't quite support its tragic conclusion, which is too schematic to be honestly moving, but it is acted with such a sense of life that one responds to its demonstration of humanity if not to its programmed metaphors."^[12]

The film opens with original music by composer Jack Nitzsche, featuring an eerie bowed saw and wine glasses. Commenting on the score, reviewer Steven McDonald has said, "The edgy nature of the film extends into the score, giving it a profoundly disturbing feel at times -- even when it appears to be relatively normal. The music has a tendency to always be a little off-kilter, and from time to time it tilts completely over into a strange little world of its own ..."^[13]

The film went on to win the "Big Five" Academy Awards at the 48th Oscar ceremony. These include the Best Actor for Jack Nicholson, Best Actress for Louise Fletcher, Best Direction for Forman, Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman. The film currently has a 95% "Certified Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 8.9/10.^[14] Its consensus states "The onscreen battle between Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher serves as a personal microcosm of the culture wars of the 1970s -- and testament to the director's vision that the film retains its power more than three decades later."

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is considered to be one of the greatest American films. Ken Kesey participated in the early stages of script development, but withdrew after creative differences with the producers over casting and narrative point of view; ultimately he filed suit against the production and won a settlement.^[15] Kesey himself claimed never to have seen the movie, but said he disliked what he knew of it,^[16] a fact confirmed by Chuck Palahniuk who wrote, "The first time I heard this story, it was through the movie starring Jack Nicholson. A movie that Kesey once told me he disliked."^[17]

In 1993, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.

Awards and honors

Others

American Film Institute

• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies — #20
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains:
  • Nurse Ratched — #5 Villain
  • Randle Patrick McMurphy — Nominated Hero^[18]
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers — #17
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) — #33

See also

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (play)
• Mental illness in film
• List of Academy Award records
• White savior narrative in film

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film).

Wikiquote has quotations related to: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Internet Movie Database
• One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest at the TCM Movie Database
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at Rotten Tomatoes

Ken Kesey Novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) Caverns (1989) Sailor Song (1992) Last Go Round with Ken Babbs (1994) Collections Kesey's Garage Sale (1973) Demon Box (1986) Kesey's Jail Journal (2003) Plays Over the Border (1973) The Furthur Enquiry (1990) Twister (1999) Adaptations One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1963 play) Sometimes a Great Notion (1971 film) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975 film) Related Merry Pranksters Further bus Acid Tests Neal Cassady Carolyn Garcia Lee Quarnstrom Ken Babbs The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Magic Trip