One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest (1975) is one of the greatest American films of all time - a $4.4
million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is
set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in
Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant,
wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and
status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients' supervisory nurse).
Expressing his basic human rights and impulses, he protests against
heavy-handed rules about watching the World Series, and illegally stages both a
fishing trip and a drinking party in the ward - leading to his own paralyzing
lobotomy.
Jack Nicholson's acting persona as the heroic
rebel McMurphy, who lives free or dies (through an act of mercy killing), had
earlier been set with his performances in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970). The mid-70s
baby-boomers' counter-culture was ripe for a film dramatizing rebellion and
insubordination against oppressive bureaucracy and an insistence upon rights,
self-expression, and freedom.
The role of the sexually-repressed, domineering
Nurse Ratched was turned down by five actresses - Anne Bancroft, Colleen
Dewhurst, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, and Angela Lansbury - until Louise
Fletcher accepted casting (in her debut film) only a week before filming began.
And actor James Caan was also originally offered the lead role of McMurphy, and
Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman were considered as well.
It surprised everyone by becoming enormously
profitable - the seventh-highest-grossing film ever (at its time), bringing in
almost $300 million worldwide. The independently-produced film also swept the
Oscars: it was the first film to take all the major awards (Best Picture, Best
Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress) since Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934). It was nominated
for nine Academy Awards in total: Best Actor (Jack Nicholson with his first win
after losing the previous year for Chinatown (1974)), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Adapted
Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler), Best
Director, Best Editing, Best Picture, Best Score (Jack Nitzsche) and Best
Supporting Actor (Brad Dourif). "Cuckoo's Nest" beat out tough
competition for Best Picture by Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Altman's Nashville (1975).
The film's unauthorized screenplay (by Lawrence
Hauben and Bo Goldman) was restructured and adapted from author Ken Kesey's
1962 popular, best-selling novel of the same name so that it would appeal to
contemporary audiences. [Kesey wrote the first version of the film's
screenplay.] The film's title was derived from a familiar, tongue-twisting
Mother's Goose children's folk song (or nursery rhyme) called Vintery,
Mintery, Cutery, Corn. The ones that fly east and west are diametrically
opposed to each other and represent the two combatants in the film. The one
that flies over the cuckoo's nest [the mental hospital filled with
"cuckoo" patients] is the giant, 'deaf-mute' Chief:
Vintery, mintery,
cutery, corn,
Apple seed and
apple thorn;
Wire, briar, limber
lock,
Three geese in a
flock.
One flew east,
And one flew west,
And one flew over
the cuckoo's nest.
The novel was originally dramatized on Broadway
(an adapted play by Dale Wasserman) beginning in 1963 with actor Kirk Douglas
starring in the lead role as McMurphy and Gene Wilder as stuttering Billy
Bibbit. Kirk Douglas bought the rights to the novel, but couldn't convince film
studios to produce the film. Many years after its short theatrical run, Douglas
transferred the rights to his son, actor/producer Michael Douglas, who
co-produced the United Artists film with Saul Zaentz. Michael Douglas had
considered playing the starring role, but by the time of the film's production,
he judged himself too old.
Kesey had derived most of the novel's secondary
characters from real-life psychiatric ward patients at a VA hospital (in Menlo
Park, CA) where he had once worked in a night job in the late 50s. Kesey was so
incensed by the change in the perspective of the story-telling (away from Chief
Bromden's first-person perspective) and other changes in the script that he
sued the producers.)
The film's credits play under an Oregonian
wilderness scene at dawn, as a car's headlights move across the screen. A
black-coated supervisory nurse, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) (known as Big
Nurse in the novel) arrives at the locked, security ward of a state mental
hospital [on location in Salem, Oregon at the Oregon State Hospital/Asylum],
where patient inmates, nurses, and orderlies attend to early morning
medications. Pills are dispensed from the Nurses' Station, a large booth with
sliding glass panels.
An energetic, swaggering, wisecracking,
non-conformist, rebellious patient/prisoner Randle Patrick (R. P.)
"Mac" McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), 38 years old, is escorted into the
ward where he meets some of the bizarre, memorable patients/inmates (most of
whom are voluntarily committed):
·
a silent,
dignified, huge and towering Indian giant "Chief" Bromden, aka
"Broom" (Creek Indian Will Sampson in his film debut) - a "deaf
and dumb Indian" "as big as a god-damn tree trunk" - with a
father blinded after many years of alcoholism
·
a pathetic,
incessantly stuttering, paranoid boychild, thirty-year old Billy Bibbit (Brad
Dourif in his film debut) - shy, virginal, impressionable, and deathly afraid
of his mother
·
an ineffectual,
rationalizing intellectual Dale Harding (William Redfield) - relatively sane
but unable to get over his wife's betrayal and adultery when she "seeks
attention elsewhere"
·
an insecure
neurotic Charlie Cheswick (Sydney Lassick) lacking self-confidence
·
a short,
smiling Martini (Danny De Vito in one of his earliest roles) with an immature
personality
·
a cynical,
trouble-making sadist Taber (Christopher Lloyd in his film debut)
Dr. Spivey (real
hospital superintendent Dr. Dean Brooks), the head doctor at the institution,
interviews McMurphy.
With his logical mind and a bent against
bureaucratic illogic, McMurphy offers his own assessment: "Well, as near
as I can figure out, it's 'cause I, uh, fight and fuck too much." The
doctor reminds McMurphy of his five arrests for assault, to which McMurphy
replies: "Five fights, huh? Rocky Marciano's got forty and he's a
millionaire." The crime of statutory rape put him into jail.
The prison officials think he's been
"fakin' it," pretending to be insane to get himself transferred out
of the hard work details of the prison work farm. McMurphy actually admits that
he is sane: "I'm a god-damn marvel of modern science." But he agrees
to cooperate during a period of evaluation, study, and treatment of his condition.
McMurphy is assigned to a ward supervised by a
consistent, bureaucratic authoritarian named Nurse Mildred Ratched and soon
senses he must battle her, antagonized by her emasculating, slightly sadistic,
and domineering attitude in a chaotic group therapy session. The scene ends
with her powerful, yet placid and internalized, self-satisfied smile. With
controlled but manic lunacy, the new misfit patient brings life to the dead
atmosphere of the mental institution in a number of scenes, winning a number of
rounds over his arch-enemy.
While the non-restricted patients board a field
trip bus during a restorative outdoor exercise period, he teaches those left
behind, including the Chief, an "old Indian game" - basketball, in a
fenced-in court. "It's called, uh, put the ball in the hole." On the
shoulders of Bancini (Josip Elic), a Frankenstein-like inmate, he demonstrates
how to dunk the ball in the hoop. With a cool, emotionally controlled look,
Nurse Ratched views his antics from the ward's window.
With card-shark skill, he introduces card games
(with pornographically illustrated cards) and black jack gambling (betting
cigarettes) to the dull monotonous routine of the inmates.
First with subtle mind games, he rebels against
correct behavior and the rules of the hospital laid down by the self-righteous
and cooly-controlled Nurse, unwilling to yield to her power over his
life-affirming spirit and cunning manhood. McMurphy violates one of the
cardinal rules by entering the Nurse's Station to turn down the loud volume on
the piped-in music. When told he is forbidden, he again makes his request
outside the station, but she refuses. "That music is for everyone, Mr.
McMurphy." He calmly asks the assistant Nurse Pilbow (Mimi Sarkisian)
about the ingredients of his "horse-pill" medications during one of
the compulsory lineups for pill delivery:
But I don't like
the idea of taking something if I don't know what it is...(joking) I don't want
anyone to try and slip me salt-peter. You know what I mean?
For his resistance and questioning of the
rules, he is accused by those in power of being upset: "Don't get upset,
Mr. McMurphy." When the Nurse offers an alternative method to taking pills
orally, McMurphy decides to take his pill (but then in a symbolic, antagonistic
gesture doesn't swallow it.)
The patients are organized and controlled
through a rigid set of authoritarian rules and regulations that McMurphy
questions: "God Almighty, she's got you guys comin' or goin'. What do you
think she is, some kind of a champ or somethin'?" The contest of wills
with the Nurse is played out as a struggle to win the other inmates over to his
way of thinking and behaving by establishing a political majority, to lead
various group insurrections, and to emphasize how they have been denied their freedom
of will:
I bet in one week,
I can put a bug so far up her ass, she don't know whether to shit or wind her
wristwatch.
In the next group therapy meeting, McMurphy
begs Nurse Ratched to rearrange the "carefully worked out schedule"
of the work detail so that the inmates can watch the opener of the 1963 World
Series baseball game (at Yankee Stadium) on television, adding: "a little
change never hurt huh? A little variety?" To intimidate his liberating
challenge to the leadership of the ward and to cause no disruption to the
ward's precise schedule, she refuses: "Some men on the ward take a long,
long time to get used to the schedule. Change it now and they might find it
very disturbing."
The Nurse proposes a vote to decide the matter
- "let majority rule" - already knowing that authority and power are
on her side against the slavish, malleable, drugged-out patients. Only three
votes support McMurphy's request and he can't believe it, evoking a political
comparison: "What is this crap?...What is the matter with you guys? Come
on! Be good Americans."
When a Monopoly game between the inmates
in the tub room leads to a heated argument, McMurphy sprays the inmates with
water to cool them down, and then tells Harding, one of those which didn't vote
for his request for a rearrangement of the schedule:
...stay all wet
Harding, huh, cause I'm goin' downtown and watch the World Series anyway.
Anybody want to come with me?
Again, con-man McMurphy bets the patients that
he can escape incarceration by lifting and smashing his way out of the ward
with a heavy, marble-sided watering station. He plans to go downtown with
Cheswick and "sit down at a bar, wet our whistles and watch the ballgame.
And that's the bet! Now does anybody want any of it? Huh?" Harding,
contemptuously nicknamed "Hard-on" by McMurphy, gambles $25 that
McMurphy isn't strong enough. McMurphy moves Billy out of the way before
attempting to do the lift:
Get out of my way
son, you're usin' my oxygen.
In a dramatic, riveting, and memorable scene,
McMurphy strains and struggles valiantly to pick up the tremendous weight,
gritting his teeth - but he cannot lift it. As he strides from the room, he
turns toward the patients, refusing to acknowledge defeat, maintaining by his
example that it is better to try and fail than to meekly accept an
unsatisfactory status quo:
But I tried,
didn't I? God-damn it. At least I did that.
During the next therapy session, Nurse Ratched
determinedly presses Billy with questions about emotional disturbances
resulting from a domineering mother. Hiding beneath her own cool demeanor are
many neurotic, sexually-repressed feelings. By controlling the patients, she
zealously serves her own ego needs rather than the therapeutic needs of the
patients. Cheswick proposes another vote about watching the second game of the
World Series, thinking it would be a better therapeutic alternative. McMurphy
encourages his usually compliant and spiritless fellow patients:
I wanna see the
hands. Come on. Which one of you nuts has got the guts?
Nine votes are counted in the therapy group and
McMurphy senses victory in this round over her. But Nurse Ratched refuses to
have the other inmates won over to him and becomes the spoiler. She changes the
rules to defeat the proposal:
Nurse: There are
eighteen patients on this ward, Mr. McMurphy. And you have to have a majority
to change ward policy. So you gentlemen can put your hands down now.
McMurphy: (turning and gesturing toward other men out of hearing range on the
ward floor) You're tryin' to tell me that you're gonna count these, these poor
son-of-a-bitches, they don't know what we're talkin' about.
Nurse: Well, I have to disagree with you, Mr. McMurphy. These men are members
of the ward just as you are.
Nurse Ratched adjourns the meeting and closes
the voting session as McMurphy struggles and fails to get the
severely-disturbed patients to join in the vote. When the Chief slowly raises
his hand, McMurphy is elated, but the steely-willed Nurse rejects the vote of
10 to 8 from behind the glass panel of the Nurse's Station, and forbids them to
watch television. She claims that the vote when the meeting adjourned was 9 to
9:
McMurphy: The
Chief voted. Now, will you please turn on the television set?
Nurse: (she opens the glass panel) Mr. McMurphy, the meeting was adjourned and
the vote was closed.
McMurphy: But the vote was 10 to 8. The Chief, he's got his hand up! Look!
Nurse: No, Mr. McMurphy. When the meeting was adjourned, the vote was 9 to 9.
McMurphy: (exasperated) Aw come on, you're not gonna say that now. You're not
gonna say that now. You're gonna pull that hen-house shit now when the
vote...the Chief just voted - it was 10 to 9. Now I want that television set
turned on, right now. (The Nurse slides the glass panel across the front of the
Nurse's Station, shutting out his protest.)
In the most well-remembered sequence in the
film, McMurphy subversively pretends to be enjoying the second World Series
baseball game on television in a contest of wills with the Nurse. He
inventively re-creates the play-by-play excitement of the game. His excitement
proves infectious - the other patients join him and look up at the dark
television screen that reflects their faces - they almost believe that the game
is real.
In another evaluation session with Dr. Spivey
after a four-week stay, McMurphy responds to a question about whether he likes
it at the hospital. McMurphy explains how he has been antagonized by an
emasculating, domineering female Nurse:
McMurphy: Well,
that fuckin' Nurse, man...She, uh, she ain't honest.
Dr. Spivey: Aw now, look. Miss Ratched's one of the finest nurses we've got in
this institution.
McMurphy: Ha! Well I don't wanna break up the meeting or nothin', but she's
somethin' of a c--t, ain't she, Doc?
Dr. Spivey: How do you mean that?
McMurphy: She likes a rigged game, you know what I mean?
The doctor offers his diagnosis of McMurphy's
mental health state: "I don't see any evidence of mental illness at all.
And I think that you've been trying to put us on all this time." To prove
a point about the fine line between normality and abnormality, McMurphy
demonstrates some stereotypical "crazy" behaviors and then asks:
"Is that crazy enough for you? You want me to take a s--t on the
floor?"
In one of the film's funniest sequences, he
hijacks the field trip bus and escapes with his fellow inmates for a wild
fishing field trip. On the way, he picks up a prostitute friend named Candy
(Marya Small), who innocently asks all the "boys":
You all crazy?
In a memorable scene in which McMurphy flaunts
his disobedience, McMurphy convinces the charter boat harbor manager (Mel
Lambert) that the men are a group of doctors from the state mental institution.
He introduces each one of them: "This is Dr. Cheswick, Dr. Taber, Dr.
Frederickson, Dr. Scanlon, the famous Dr. Scanlon, Mr. Harding, Dr. Bibbit, Dr.
Martini, and Dr. Sefelt (William Duell)...Oh, I'm Dr. McMurphy, R. P.
McMurphy." On the trip to catch fish, he tells Martini:
You're not an
idiot. Huh! You're not a goddamn loony now, boy. You're a fisherman!
Although the group is jubilant during the
liberating trip, the boat actually spins in circles on the open water when
Cheswick takes the wheel. While they fish, McMurphy ventures below deck with
Candy. The inmates even come back with a full catch of fish and smiles on their
faces - their holiday away from the hospital has done them more good than a
therapy session. They are greeted at dockside by the police and Dr. Spivey.
In a meeting in Dr. Spivey's office, the
institution's doctors agree that McMurphy is "dangerous" and possibly
a threat to society, but probably not crazy. Nurse Ratched wants to keep
McMurphy in the hospital, not to "help him" but because she is
determined to control him and break him:
Dr. Spivey: The
funny thing is that the person that he's the closest to is the one he dislikes
the most...That's you, Mildred. (He gestures toward Nurse Ratched)
Nurse: Well gentlemen, my opinion, if we send him back to Pendleton or we send
him up to 'Disturbed,' it's just one more way of passing on our problems to
somebody else. You know, we don't like to do that. So I'd like to keep him on
the ward. I think we can help him.
McMurphy's lessons on basketball are effective,
and he is able to successfully coach and organize games with the patients and
guards. With his statuesque height, Chief Bromden steals the show, standing at
one end of the court with hands held high in the air to dunk baskets, and
disallowing baskets at the opponents' end of the court. After learning that he
won't be released in 68 days from the hospital to the "outside," as
he would if he was at the prison farm, McMurphy asks Nurse Ratched and the
other patients about his indeterminate length of stay:
I'd like to know
why none of the guys never told me that you, Miss Ratched, and the doctors
could keep me here 'til you're good and ready to turn me loose. That's what I'd
like to know.
He realizes that most of the patients are
voluntary and self-committed, and have the freedom to leave at any time if they
choose: "As a matter of fact, there are very few men here who are
committed - there's Mr. Bromden, Mr. Taber, some of the chronics, and
you." The inmates are not crazy at all - merely helpless misfits in the
outside world, and accepting of their fate in the walls of the institution. McMurphy
is amazed that Billy is only voluntary:
You're just a
young kid. What are you doin' here? You oughta be out in a convertible,
why...bird-doggin' chicks and bangin' beaver. What are ya doin' here, for
Christ's sake? What's funny about that? Jesus, I mean, you guys do nothin' but
complain about how you can't stand it in this place here and then you haven't
got the guts just to walk out!
To all of the inmates, he tells them that they
are no more insane than the Nurse or any of the asylum wardens:
McMurphy: What do
you think you are, for Christ's sake, crazy or something? Well, you're not!
You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walking around on
the streets and that's it!
Nurse: Those are very challenging observations you made, Randall.
Inspired by McMurphy's instigating,
"challenging observations," the patients begin to use their minds and
express their feelings, questioning the authoritarian Nurse and the system that
keeps them locked up. However, the therapy session degenerates when the patients
end up fighting with each other over cigarettes (traded as currency). The Nurse
closes down McMurphy's "gambling casino" operation in the tub room,
suspending their tub privileges and rationing their cigarettes from her office.
The scene ends when Taber screams about his burning trouser leg and Cheswick shouts
at the Nurse in an overacted temper tantrum.
McMurphy smashes his fist through the glass
panels of the Nurses' Station and seizes a carton of cigarettes for Cheswick.
When Washington (Nathan George), a black guard, tries to restrain him, they get
into a vicious wrestling match and fist-fight. The Chief enters the struggle to
help even the odds.
As punishment, Cheswick, McMurphy, and Chief
Bromden are shackled and sent upstairs to the 'Disturbed' ward to receive
electro-shock treatments. There while waiting on a bench, McMurphy realizes, to
his surprise that Bromden, like himself, has faked being deaf and dumb to close
himself off from a hypocritical society. They plan an escape together.
Later after his treatment, McMurphy walks
zombie-like into a therapy session in progress on the ward, and the inmates
respond affectionately to his return as he sparks them back to life.
He jokes to Billy
about the effectiveness of shock treatments that he received.
McMurphy's last
bold victory overextends his reach, when he plans a pre-escape party with
alcohol and prostitutes. After bribing the night watchman Turkle (Scatman
Crothers) with booze, he smuggles two girlfriends, Candy and Rose (Louisa
Moritz) into the ward late at night for a wild drinking party after the Nurse
has left. Although the patients enjoy themselves, the entire ward is quickly
destroyed. McMurphy has an opportunity to leave, but hesitates when young Billy
Bibbit expresses disappointment at the departure of his friend - and then
wishes a last-minute "date" with Candy.
McMurphy persuades Candy to sleep with Billy so
that he can experience life's fruits and lose his virginity: "All you
gotta do is this one little thing. The kid's cute, isn't he?" Billy is
delivered in a wheelchair to Candy by the other patients.
The next morning, the ward orderlies find the
place in a shambles. McMurphy has drunkenly fallen asleep on the floor. The
crash of the ward's locked gate as it closes alerts McMurphy to the Nurse's
arrival. Nurse Pilbow discovers Billy Bibbit in bed with Candy in one of the
rooms. The patients applaud his conquest when he joins them in the ward,
smiling from ear to ear. But Billy is forced to "explain everything,"
and made to feel guilty about experiencing and enjoying sex:
Nurse Ratched:
Aren't you ashamed?
Billy: (without stuttering) No, I'm not. (More applause)
Nurse: You know Billy, what worries me is how your mother's going to take this.
Threatening to inform his mother about his behavior,
thereby emasculating him, the repressive Nurse knows how to exploit Billy's
weaknesses and torment him. There are disastrous results - Billy begins
stammering again and feels so guilty and self-hating that he commits suicide by
slitting his own throat. McMurphy is unable to make a quick break for it
through the window in time but might have escaped to freedom during the
confusion. But he goes beserk beyond control when he learns of Billy's death,
feeling personally responsible for his new-found friend. When the Nurse
authoritatively instructs everyone to "calm down" and "go on
with our daily routine," he attempts to strangle her for having cruelly
contributed to Billy's suicide. He locks his hands around her throat.
In retaliation, McMurphy is restrained and led
away. Rumors spread that he has escaped, or that he has been brought upstairs
and is "as meek as a lamb." In the middle of the night, McMurphy is
returned to the ward - lobotomized, glassy-eyed, catatonic, totally passive,
and obediently captive.
In the film's conclusion, inmate Chief Bromden
realizes that "Mac" has had surgery on his brain. [A frontal lobotomy
is the surgical severance of nerve fibers connecting the frontal lobes to the
thalamus, a severe procedure commonly practiced in the 1930s-1950s on
mentally-disordered patients.] He knows that McMurphy has lost his vital vigor
and will never be able to escape with him to Canada. He hugs his friend and
then ends his misery to free him from the bondage of his existence in an act of
mercy killing. Bromden smothers and suffocates McMurphy with a pillow. Then,
with his tremendous strength and inspired by McMurphy's liberating example,
proving that a single person can still overcome oppressive conditions, he picks
up the marble wash station from the tub room and smashes through the window
with it. He escapes from the cuckoo's nest, flying away to the outer world -
yet the world's horizon is both threatening and liberating. The other inmates
remain incarcerated in the locked ward of the hospital after everything that
has transpired.
Write your own
summary of the film, without copying any of the above text, and write whether
or not you liked the film and say why. (not less than 200 words).
text adapted from the original on the web site:
http://www.filmsite.org/onef.html