IT MAY be 40 years old but One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest has lost none of its power in the passing decades.
Based on the bests-elling novel by Ken Kesey which traced the author’s experiences of working in a veterans' hospital in California, the film is set in a mental institution where an anti-authority figure Randle P McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) battles against the system that’s trying to rehabilitate him.
Within the walls of that building a raft of memorable characters reside including the nasty Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) and the wise Chief Bromden (Will Sampson), and as McMurphy stirs up rebellion against the regime we meet them all and experience their problems first hand.
Directed by Czech Milos Forman, it’s a magical film for many reasons. As a study of mental illness and how society caters for those with mental health issues, it’s truly groundbreaking. Open and raw at times, it’s a hard watch, but a rewarding one all the same.
Forman films proceedings on the wards and in the office with an unerring eye for detail and visually there’s much to admire. The performances are uniformly good too. The mixed bag of patients are well-rounded characters that are both believable in their mania and heartbreaking in their vulnerability.
It also proved a fine springboard for actors making their film debuts with both Brad Dourif and Christopher Lloyd appearing for the first time on the big screen.
Despite the array of memorable characters, it’s the figures of McMurphy and Nurse Ratched that live longest in the memory. Nicholson is flying as the anti-establishment figurehead who leads the rebellion and Fletcher is stunning in the authority-figure role, a role turned down by Jane Fonda, Anne Bancroft and Faye Dunaway.
Nicholson's performance ranks not just as one of his greatest ever but possibly one of the greatest ever committed to celluloid. There are bigger, wilder Nicholson turns out there, from the Joker to The Shining, but he arguably never bettered this.
The rights to the novel had been held for some years by Kirk Douglas but by the time it came for the film to be made the Spartacus star felt he was too old to take the lead role. His son Michael did, however, get his first taste of Oscar success when he picked up an award for his role as producer.
A vast success with the Academy voters, it also took home deserved awards for both Nicholson, Fletcher, Forman and screenwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, among others.
Ken Kesey never watched the film, disgruntled as he was that Forman decided not to tell the tale from the perspective of Chief Bromden as he had done in his book, but that’s his loss.
Bolstered by those unforgettable central performances, a clear-eyed and shockingly honest and humanistic view of how human beings behave when they are incarcerated, and how those incarcerating them behave in turn, it’s got a beautiful, evocative score from Jack Nitzche and enough moments of on-screen magic to make it a true cinema classic.
