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.

The Fortune (1975)

Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Adrien Joyce
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Stockard Channing

Index: The First Thirty.

Going into this project, I believe I’d seen ten out of Jack Nicholson’s first twenty-five films; it would be fair to say that catching up on the rest was quite an eye-opening experience. I’d seen the last five in his First Thirty but found that I’d completely forgotten this and catching up on it was underwhelming. It’s not that it’s a bad movie; it’s just outshone by all the others.

It’s a Mike Nichols film, reuniting Nicholson with him four years on from Carnal Knowledge, but it feels tame in comparison. It’s set in the twenties, so just a little earlier than Chinatown, but it carries none of that film’s depth. And it’s based on a script by Carole Eastman, credited as Adrien Joyce, as she was for both Five Easy Pieces and The Shooting, but this isn’t up to the standards of either, probably because she was fired after objecting to the director’s cuts.

It probably doesn’t help that it’s a wild farce surrounded by serious dramas, much different from Nicholson’s previous comedy, Head, that was made before he had become a star.

Tommy (1975)

Director: Ken Russell
Writer: Ken Russell, based on the Rock Opera by Pete Townshend with additional material by John Entwistle and Keith Moon
Stars: Oliver Reed, Ann-Margret, Roger Daltrey and Elton John

Index: The First Thirty.

Regular readers will know I’m hardly a huge fan of musicals, but the ones I tend to enjoy do one of two things. Either the songs make sense from a story standpoint, like Singin’ in the Rain, or the entire movie is sung, like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. This follows the latter approach.

Also, it’s a psychedelic rock opera that was written by Pete Townshend; performed by the Who and very special guests; and directed by Ken Russell right before Lisztomania, so there’s plenty for me to enjoy. As I haven’t seen it in decades, my wonder going in was whether I’d adore it or despise it. What I wasn’t expecting was to end up somewhere in between the two.

Then again, I have mixed feelings about the Who. When they’re good they’re amazing, but not everything works and I was reminded very much of that in the early scenes here, which I enjoyed far more for Russell’s visual style than for the music behind it.

The Passenger (1975)

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writer: Mark Peploe, Peter Wollen and Michelangelo Antonioni, based on a story by Mark Peploe
Stars: Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider

Index: The First Thirty.

As with Chinatown and the three remaining films in Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty, I’ve seen this one before. However, that was as long ago as 2008 and even then I realised that it wasn’t a one watch film. A fresh viewing at a different time in my life elevated it considerably for me.

It has a plot, but it’s not the point. Jack plays David Locke, a journalist struggling to land an interview with the rebels in a country we later learn is Chad. He’s on his own and he’s failing consistently. People guide him so far and then walk away, stranding him. His Land Rover gets stuck in a sand dune. Walking back to his hotel leaves him seriously sunburned.

When he discovers a fellow traveller dead in the next room, of natural causes, he takes the opportunity to swap identities with him. Now he’s David Robertson and he’s shed his old life that has ceased to have meaning any more. He doesn’t yet know that Robertson is dangerous, an arms dealer who has promised weapons to the very same rebels Locke failed to meet.

Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

Director: Jean Renoir
Writer: Pierre Lestringuez
Stars: Catherine Hessling, Pierre Philippe, Maurice Touzé and Harold Levingston

Index: That's a Wrap!

1925 was the gift that kept on giving when it came to new directors. February saw Josef von Sternberg debut with The Salvation Hunters and René Clair follow him just one week later with The Crazy Ray. March means the debut of Jean Renoir, whose The Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game are often described as the greatest films ever made. If that wasn’t enough, April would introduce Sergei Eisenstein with Strike.

Whirlpool of Fate is a routine melodrama but there are moments to suggest that Renoir had what it took to become notable as a filmmaker the way his father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, had became notable as a painter. To be fair, he had co-directed a feature with Albert Dieudonné a year earlier, Catherine, but that wasn’t released until 1927. This second film was seen first and he directed it on his own.

One of those moments arrives at the start of the film, just after we’re introduced to Gudule, the young lady at its heart. She’s on horseback to lead the family barge forward. Her brute of an uncle, Jeff, walks backwards on the barge as it passes the camera at exactly the same speed, making it appear as if he’s making no progress at all. It’s not a particularly difficult shot but it shows how the young Renoir had a keen eye.

Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925)

Directors: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
Writers: Terry Ramsaye and Richard P. Carver
Stars: Haidar Khan and Lufta

Index: That's a Wrap!

Here’s something a little different: a feature film whose première was at the annual dinner of the Explorers Club in New York. Then again, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, a duo best known today for directing King Kong, could be fairly described in 1925 as explorers.

Initially a journalist, Cooper became a pilot, serving in multiple wars. He was shot down in action in the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War, resulting in time spent in German and Soviet POW camps. Marguerite Harrison, an American spy, who he had met in Warsaw, helped him out in the latter.

Back home, he returned to journalism and a job writing articles for Asia magazine, seeking the Missing Link in the Malay archipelago and visiting Ras Tafari in Abyssinia, where footage was shot by Schoedsack. They were grounded by pirates in the Red Sea but escaped, only for the ship to burn in Suez.

Chinatown (1974)

Director: Roman Polanski
Writer: Robert Towne
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston

Index: The First Thirty.

Apparently not content to successfully surf the changing waves of a film industry almost unrecognisably different from the fifties to the seventies, Jack Nicholson blistered his way to the end of his First Thirty. He ended it with an Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but I’m just as eager to see Chinatown again, as it’s been almost two decades since I saw it last. It’s going to be interesting to see which of the two is the better film. It may well be this one.

Everything about it stands up, even though it’s inherently hindered by being a colour film noir. Something about noir demands black and white, more truly infinite shades of grey, but a sunbleached Los Angeles during a drought is a strong second best. Neonoir has never looked better in colour and anamorphic widescreen.

In fact, everything is tasty from the start, including the opening credits, with their sepia tones, elegant typefaces and smoky jazz score. Nicholson even looks somewhat elegant in his white suit and sumptuous office, compared to what the hardboiled dicks of the thirties lived in. J. J. Gittes even has a couple of assistants on his payroll, not just a beautiful secretary.

Seven Chances (1925)

Director: Buster Keaton
Writers: Jean Havez and Joseph Mitchell, from the play by by Roi Cooper Megrue
Star: Buster Keaton

Index: That's a Wrap!

This is a far more enjoyable feature than its one joke premise ought to warrant. Of course, it’s a Buster Keaton movie, which helps, but he wisely wraps it up early at under an hour and breaks that up into forty minutes of story and a sixteen minute chase scene.

As a story, it’s weak, but, as a warm up to an impeccable chase scene, it’s enjoyable enough. It probably doesn’t hurt that the opening is in early Process 2 Technicolor, which was almost a trend in 1925, with The Phantom of the Opera and Ben-Hur both following suit.

It was no pioneer: the lost 1917 film The Gulf Between was Process 1 Technicolor and The Toll of the Sea in 1922 and Wanderer of the Wasteland in 1924 were Process 2, and others, like The Ten Commandments, had Process 2 sequences. That said, the third Process 2 feature wouldn’t show up until 1926, The Black Pirate.

The Last Detail (1973)

Director: Hal Ashby
Writer: Robert Towne, based on the novel by Darryl Ponicsan
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Otis Young and Randy Quaid

Index: The First Thirty.

I was constantly faced with an odd question as I watched my way through Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty. Did he rise to stardom because he changed with changing times better than any other actor or did the times merely happen to change in a way that suited him best?

I still haven’t figured that out but this marks another change that worked either way. When The Last Detail was released, it contained sixty-five instances of the F word, thus breaking the record at the time. The script contained many more—hundreds more—but Columbia Pictures baulked at the quantity and required changes.

Watching in 2025, however, I didn’t notice it at all. That’s not even one a minute! The Wolf of Wall Street had three and a half every minute and it was three hours long. This was nothing.

The reason that scriptwriter Robert Towne gave for such frequent profanity is that “this is the way people talk when they’re powerless to act” and that’s ultimately what the movie is about. The protagonists of the film don’t have any power to do anything, even if the week we spend with them briefly makes them feel like they do. They don’t and the final scene makes that very clear indeed. We leave them bitching and moaning because that’s all they can do.

The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge (1925)

Director: René Clair
Writer: René Clair
Stars: Georges Vaultier and Sandra Milovanoff

Index: That's a Wrap!

I’ve already reviewed a 1925 René Clair film for this project, The Crazy Ray, but he shot that a year earlier, along with his debut, a surreal short called Entr’acte. This full length feature continues his love affair with fantastic cinema with a film that plays out like The Invisible Man but with an unusual spiritual twist.

Initially, however, it’s a routine melodrama about a young lady’s hand, which makes the eventual shift all the more wild. She’s Yvonne Vincent and she’s very much in love with her fiancé, Julien Boissel, a successful businessman who’s just as in love with her. Unfortunately, a scurrilous publisher, Gauthier, wants to marry her too and his claim wins out because he has blackmail material on her father, some sort of shady deal he made when he was a diplomat.

There’s a bit more depth than that because Julien has made a major deal as the film begins that all the papers are happy about except the Streets’ Echo, run by—guess who?—Gauthier! So Julien therefore has a pair of grudges against the man about to steal his fiancée.