One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest movie review (1975)

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975) is on every list of favorite films. It was the first film since "It Happened One Night" (1934) to win all five of the top Academy Awards, for best picture, actor (Nicholson), actress (Louise Fletcher), director (Milos Forman) and screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman). It could for that matter have won, too, for cinematography (Haskell Wexler) and editing (Richard Chew). I was present at its world premiere, at the 1975 Chicago Film Festival, in the 3,000-seat Uptown Theatre, and have never heard a more tumultuous reception for a film (no, not even during "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial" at Cannes). After the screening, the young first-time co-producer, Michael Douglas, wandered the lobby in a daze.

But what did the audience, which loved the film so intensely, think it was about? The film is remembered as a comedy about the inmate revolt led by McMurphy, and the fishing trip, the all-night orgy, and his defiance of Nurse Ratched (Fletcher)--but in fact it is about McMurphy's defeat. One can call it a moral victory, and rejoice in the Chief's escape, but that is small consolation for McMurphy.

The film is based on Ken Kesey's 1962 best-selling novel, which Pauline Kael observed "contained the prophetic essence of the whole Vietnam period of revolutionary politics going psychedelic." Toned down for the 1970s into a parable about society's enforcement of conformism, it almost willfully overlooked the realities of mental illness in order to turn the patients into a group of cuddly characters ripe for McMurphy's cheerleading. We discover that the Chief is not really mute, Billy need not stutter, and others need not be paralyzed by shyness or fear. They will be cured not by Nurse Ratched's pills, Muzak and discussion groups, but by McMurphy liberating them to be guys--to watch the World Series on TV, go fishing, play pick-up basketball, get drunk, get laid. The message for these wretched inmates is: Be like Jack.

The movie's simplistic approach to mental illness is not really a fault of the movie, because it has no interest in being about insanity. It is about a free spirit in a closed system. Nurse Ratched, who is so inflexible, so unseeing, so blandly sure she is right, represents Momism at its radical extreme, and McMurphy is the Huck Finn who wants to break loose from her version of civilization. The movie is among other things profoundly fearful of women; the only two portrayed positively are McMurphy's hooker friends Candy and Rose. I mean this as an observation, not a criticism.