One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Director: Milos Forman
Writers: Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher and William Redfield

Index: The First Thirty.

Thirty was always just an arbitrary number for this project but it couldn’t have played out any better for Jack Nicholson. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest won him the Academy Award for Best Actor on his fourth attempt; he’d lost out in three of the five previous years, for Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail and Chinatown. He’d also lost the year before them as a supporting actor for Easy Rider.

He deserved it too, even over both Al Pacino for Dog Day Afternoon and Maximilian Schell for The Man in the Glass Booth. He’s brilliant here as Randle McMurphy, the movie’s primary focus, but he doesn’t carry it because this may be the best ensemble performance since 12 Angry Men and it isn’t inappropriate that it swept the five main Oscars, something only achieved before by 1934’s It Happened One Night.

By the time Randle, who goes by RP, arrives in handcuffs at the mental institution where a majority of the film unfolds, we already saw a few recognisable faces and we see more while he’s waiting for the ice cold Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched to process him.

That’s Vincent Schiavelli and Brad Dourif, a stutterer here who’s playing cards with Danny DeVito, who’s hardly recognisable. His future Taxi co-star, Christopher Lloyd, shows up soon too. If we know where the film goes, it’s tough not to respond when we see Will Sampson, like Dourif, a debuting actor here. And to follow up on that, while there are serious developments late in the story that would constitute spoilers I’m not going to provide, this film is one of the rare ones that doesn’t just not lose its power if we know what’s coming, it may actually gain it from the anticipation.

What I’ll say to those who haven’t seen this before is that RP shouldn’t be here. He was put in a work farm after a conviction for statutory rape and he’s devious enough to pretend to be crazy to get sent to a mental institution where he won’t need to work. We can see this in his very first scene as he whoops and hollers and practically dances his way in until he realises that nobody else is crazy that way and calms a long way down.

Every other patient, however, is there for a reason. Some are utterly non-responsive and some are developmentally challenged. Many of them, however, simply have issues they’re learning to address with help, like repressed homosexuality, anxiety and manic depression. RP, of course, doesn’t fit in this company and so shakes up their neat routines. One question that the movie asks is whether that’s a good thing or not.

And this movie asks a lot of questions. Nurse Ratched is trusted by the staff and she believes in what she’s doing. She honestly thinks she’s helping her patients and, hey, maybe she is. In time, however, we realise how much she relies on having complete control because RP has an effective way of chipping away at it, turning a potentially healthy nurse/patient relationship into a battle of wills. By the brutal end of the film, it could be argued that RP, a patient, has a greater success rate than Nurse Ratched, a senior medical professional. And if we believe that, what does it say about the system giving her power?

While Nicholson is truly inspired here, in an epochal performance, surely his greatest thus far, he’s not alone. Fletcher is outstanding too, also a worthy Oscar winner. Will Sampson and Brad Dourif, each earning his first credit, are impeccable, with the former not even given an ability to speak for a good chunk of the movie and the latter only allowed to stutter for most of it. Pay attention to when he doesn’t and see what happens to bring it right back again. This time through I was vastly impressed by Sidney Lassick, as Charlie Cheswick, but every one of the core supporting cast absolutely nails their role. It’s ridiculous to see how early this was in so many of their careers.

The obvious way to watch this is to follow a path laid down by Nicholson as RP McMurphy. This is his film and he knows it. Everyone else is stable when he arrives, broken for sure but set in established routines. He shatters those a heartbeat later, partly for the sheer mischief of it but partly for concrete reasons. He wants to watch the World Series but Nurse Ratched won’t allow it unless the ward votes for it and half of them are non-responsive, so he faces a real challenge—“Which one of you nuts has got any guts?”—and, when denied, stirs them up by improvising imaginary commentary.

However, just like there are albums where I find myself listening multiple times but with a different focus on a different musician playing a different instrument, I realise that this is the perfect movie to watch from the perspectives of many different cast members. Try to see RP from Nurse Ratched’s perspective. Follow the other patients, most especially Billy Bibbit but the rest as well. See how Cheswick and Taber and especially the Chief change because of RP. Did they end the film in a better place and, if they didn’t, was that his doing or someone or something else’s?

And look at them all together, these various patients and the actors who give them life and remember that this didn’t start out as a movie. It started out as a book, by Ken Kesey, who had spent time in a California mental institution as an orderly on the graveyard shift. Apparently, he also took psychoactive drugs as part of the notorious MKUltra project, by choice unlike a good percentage of others.

The book was published in 1962 and its huge success prompted a Broadway adaptation only a year later, with Kirk Douglas as RP and Joan Tetzel as Nurse Ratched. It boggles my mind to realise that Billy Bibbit was initially played on stage by Gene Wilder.

Douglas had also bought the rights to film it at the same time, outbidding Nicholson, whose clout wasn’t major in 1962, and he even hired Miloš Forman to direct, but was unable to find a studio willing to work with him and couldn’t even get a copy of the novel to Forman, what with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Eventually, a decade later, it was Douglas’s son Michael who got it going, bringing Forman back, who saw it as a story about his life. Nurse Ratched to him was the Communist Party that squashed every individualistic thought.

Of course, because of the nature of stage vs. film, we can’t see Kirk Douglas as RP or indeed Gary Sinise in the 2001 revival that won him a Tony or Christian Slater two years later. What we have is this film and Nicholson is enough.