A Guide to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975)

By Stefanie Griffin, SUNY Fredonia

USA, color, 133 Minutes

Available on DVD and VCR.

Director: Milos Forman

Writing Credits: Bo Goldman, Lawrence Hauben, Ken Kesey

Producers: Michael Douglas, Martin Fink, Saul Zaentz

Film Editing: Sheldon Kahn, Lynzee Klingman

Casting: Jane Feinberg, Mike Fenton

Production Design: Paul Sylbert

Costume Design: Aggie Guerard Rodgers

Jack Nicholson (Randall Patrick McMurphy)

Louise Fletcher (Nurse Mildred Ratched)

Will Sampson (Chief Bromden)

Sydney Lassick (Charlie Cheswick)

Brad Dourif (Billy Bibbit)

Danny DeVito (Martini)

Randall McMurphy is sent to prison for statutory rape, and while there, he pretends to be insane to get out of doing work. The jail sends him to an insane asylum to be evaluated for mental illness. McMurphy’s first challenge in the asylum is Nurse Ratched. Nurse Ratched is not concerned about the welfare of her patients, only with her authoritarian rule over them. McMurphy sees that the men are weak and afraid of defying Nurse Ratched and so he continually questions the rules of the institution to set an example for the other patients. The others catch on and during therapy sessions patients like Cheswick, Martini and Taber act out against the system and start to question Nurse Ratched’s motives. One example of McMurphy’s defiance of Nurse Ratched is when she denies him the right to watch the World Series even though a majority of the ward patients ruled in favor of it. He then goes to sit in front of the TV and excitedly he jumps up in the air screaming something about second base. Nurse Ratched takes away his freedom to watch the game, but not his imagination to pretend there is a game on the TV. The men all crowd around him and yell and cheer at the TV as if they were watching a real game. Randall encourages the men to have fun and enjoy life. Bibbit, a young man in the ward, is encouraged by McMurphy to sleep with a prostitute that McMurphy sneaks in. In the morning, Nurse Ratched finds Bibbit in bed with the girl and questions him about it, threatening to tell his mother. Bibbit is scared and commits suicide, inducing McMurphy to strangle Ratched for her cold-heartedness. As punishment for his actions, McMurphy receives a lobotomy and electroshock therapy. He is lifeless and so his good friend in the ward, Chief Bromden, suffocates him to death.

Schickel, Richard. "Aborted Flight," TIME 1 December 1975: 68.

Schickel maintains that some of the true mental drama of Ken Kesey’s novel is lost in this cinematic counterpart. Claiming that the movie does not completely submerge its audience into the mundane, yet complex life of the patients, Schickel seeks more depth in the characters than is provided by the script. McMurphy’s thoughts are left unclear and are never fully exposed to the audience; Schickel asserts that he was never quite sure of McMurphy’s motive in leading the asylum patients to believe in themselves. Schickel asks if McMurphy is acting out of ideals or if he is insane in trying to break such a system. He sees McMurphy as unambiguous, charismatic, and a casualty of the thirst for living. Schickel's title "Aborted Flight" is symbolic of two things. Not only is McMurphy’s flight to lead the patients out of the asylum aborted by his death in the movie, but also in reality Schickel is saying that this movie never took off. It tried to soar into the minds of human beings, but it was incapable and therefore: flight aborted.

Schickel argues that Nicholson plays McMurphy as an unambiguous man with no evil tendencies or shadiness. I think that Schickel is only coloring McMurphy white because he is comparing McMurphy with the rest of the patients in the ward; within this comparison, yes, McMurphy is charming and ‘normal.’ Because McMurphy has not been in the asylum long, he still can also be compared to humans in the world outside the hospital. In his own right, McMurphy is many times depicted as a crazy man. Although he is never classified as one, Nicholson has the ability to twist McMurphy’s facial expression into those of a man with too many thoughts going through his brain. He is never certifiable, but he does act a little shady and can’t control his anger or rage when overcome by realizing how these patients are being victimized. McMurphy develops an identifiable hatred for Nurse Ratched by the end of the movie and the audience cheers when he strangles her. He shows his psychotic side when he cannot contain his rage and physically attacks her.

Denby, David. "Cuckoo’s Nest is Just An Adolescent Fantasy," NEW YORK TIMES 21 Dec. 1975, sec 1:1.

Denby believes that Cuckoo’s main focus was the fear of being overpowered by women. The men in the asylum are portrayed as morally weak by not being able to stand up to the woman in their life: Nurse Ratched. McMurphy's role is not only to aid the men in defeating Nurse Ratched, but he also helps the men in overcoming the women in themselves. Denby claims that Kesey’s revolt against society pertains only to men. He supports his theory by emphasizing the fact that Kesey wrote the women in the film as either good women, willing to sleep with any man if their protector and hero asks them to, or cold, power-hungry women like Nurse Ratched. Denby believes that the audience members that have no experience with asylums are being misled. When does a nurse ever have the sole power to order a lobotomy? Reminded of childhood tricks played on a teacher, Denby asserts that McMurphy is no more rebellious than a kid is and not some omniscient leader.

I agree with Denby’s theory that the prevalent fear among the patients is their loss of power over their own lives. I do not think however, that the fear is concentrated on the control that the women have over the men. Nurse Ratched is a horrible, cold and unsympathetic person, but she should not be blamed for their tendencies to fear powerful women. It is sexist for Denby to imply that these men are morally weak and that this weakness constitutes the womanly side of them. Is he implying that all women are weak? Denby continually makes generalizations and assumptions throughout this review. He assumes that since the patients hate Nurse Ratched, they hate all women in power. He assumes that if there is one morally corrupt woman, again Nurse Ratched, that all woman are morally weak and corrupt. Denby states in his review that Forman is sending out the wrong message as a director. By drawing the audience into the eyes and perceptions of the patients, they come to hate Nurse Ratched and are grateful for McMurphy’s attempt to strangle her to death. He questions Forman’s integrity in directing a film that would cause its audience to clap at the murderous attempt to kill someone who has done nothing unlawful, harmful maybe, but not unlawful. I think that Denby has to get over his self-righteousness. It doesn’t take an act against the Constitution to create within the human spirit distaste for a person like Nurse Ratched.

Canby, Vincent. "Cuckoo’s Nest- A Sane Comedy About Psychotics," NEW YORK TIMES 23 Nov. 1975, sec. 1: 1.

Canby praises Jack Nicholson in this motion picture he calls a comedy. Canby states more than once that this movie is too simplistically written to be taken seriously. He focuses on the struggle between conformity and non-conformity within any society. In this case, the society is the Mental Asylum. Outside of the asylum, McMurphy is considered crazy and a little loony; and inside the asylum, he does not fit the profile for a mentally ill person (yet again, how many of those patients really do). He is a non-conformist anywhere he goes. He does not choose to be a non-conformist, but it is thrust upon him. Canby believes that McMurphy was put in the asylum because society could not tolerate his free spirit. He does not change himself when he goes into the asylum, instead the asylum changes him. Nicholson, Canby argues, considerably enhanced the performances of the other actors and actresses. He is the focus of the movie, but he spotlights those around him. Nicholson was able to portray his character in such a truly convincing way that the actors and actresses surrounding him were able to benefit from his ability by playing off of it.

I do not One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a comedy, but agree with Canby that as a serious movie, it falls short. Canby is open to the idea of conformity and how one might never find where they truly belong. McMurphy was rejected by the society of the world and also by the ruling class society of the Insane Asylum. In order to make McMurphy conform, to make their jobs and lives easier, the mental asylum workers slowly kill him and take away his free spirit. Then and only then would he not cause any trouble or speak up against authority. Nicholson does an excellent job at his role, but I would like to extend more credit to the other actors than Canby was willing to give. The other characters were equally as convincing in their roles throughout the movie. Nurse Ratched was cast perfectly and audiences everywhere should pay tribute to the casting directors for allowing her the part.

One Retrospective Review:

Landers, David. "Reviews", 1997. Retrieved: 13 March 2002. Review of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Milos Forman <http://www.rottentomatoes.com/author-1377/>.

Summary-

Lander rates One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as a 4 star movie (out of 4 stars). He praises the cast and congratulates Nicholson on his excellent portrayal of McMurphy as the courageous hero that he is. Forman has done a wonderful job representing the terrible clinical system that is in place within this mental institution, and possibly representing the inhumane treatment within all mental asylums. McMurphy bends the rules as often as he can, in order to enjoy life and make life at the ward more exciting. He leads the fellow patients in a "peasant uprising" against Nurse Ratched and because of this, the men start to enjoy themselves without being threatened or ruled by the terrible head Nurse. Lander was left in emotional turmoil at the end of the movie, where his only salvation from the horrible grief that accompanied him upon McMurphy’s death was remembering the sensational performances of the characters.

Lander gives too much praise to McMurphy for being a bold, strong, and courageous man. McMurphy was just a man who liked to live life and could not understand why these patients were letting themselves be ruled by Nurse Ratched. As he did grow friendships throughout the movie, his main reasons for defying authority in the beginning were to please himself, not the others. He wanted something to keep him busy while he was temporarily in the nuthouse. Somewhere along the way he ended up caring for the other patients and did not want them to be cowards, but I would not call him courageous for that. Most people, when told that they cannot have something they want, they want it even more. McMurphy was told that he had to be in the asylum for a while and that he had to forgo his usual pleasures. This led him to break the chains of the system in order for him to have a little fun. He eventually learned that no other patients had ever dared to cross Nurse Ratched and he paid the ultimate price for his defiance in the end. McMurphy does not grow in this movie. Yes, he starts to care about the other men and, yes he wants them to think for themselves, but all he did was assert his idea of the fair and just world onto the world of the asylum. He did not purposefully defy the system in order to be courageous and heroic, he was being a reasonable human being. He saw a terrible injustice being done to these men, and wanted to right the wrong. That, however, is all he did.

Movie Goofs:

McMurphy, when first arriving at the hospital, was accompanied by two guards. The script called for him to jump up and kiss one of the guards on the cheek (guard was specified in the script). Director Milos Forman was unhappy with the guard’s reaction and told Nicholson to jump up and kiss the other guard instead. These changes were made unbeknownst to the guards and when McMurphy jumps up to kiss the new guard on the cheek, he is surprised and in some versions can be seen punching McMurphy.

When, at the end of the movie, McMurphy returns to the ward with two doctors, one doctor sets his doctor’s bag on a table. The camera zooms in on McMurphy getting tucked into bed and them zooms out to span the room again. In this shot, the doctor’s both leave the ward and no doctor’s bag can be found on the table or in the doctors’ hands.

While counting votes for the World Series, Nicholson accidentally says 10 to 9 when the actual count is 10 to 8. The scene is not replaced because it was acted out so well.

During the basketball game the camera follows McMurphy to the edge of the court, and for a moment, reveals an assortment of film production equipment including lighting stands, C-stands, lighting gels and even a crew member. This equipment can only be seen in the wide screen version.

Movie Facts:

Will Sampson, who plays Chief, was given the part because he was a park ranger in Oregon, near the filming site.

Many stars, such as Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Page, Anne Bancroft, Colleen Dewhurst and Angela Lansbury turned down the role of Nurse Ratched.

The backups for Nicholson were Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman.

This movie is one of only three movies in history that have won the Top Five Academy Awards, which are: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay.

This movie was filmed in Salem, Oregon, at the Oregon State Hospital.

The Superintendent of the Oregon State Hospital (where most of the shooting took place), Dean Brooks, made his film debut in this movie.

Anjelica Huston had a cameo role as a crowd member on the docks when McMurphy returns from the fishing excursion. Huston and Nicholson were dating during the filming of this movie.

There is a rumor that Nicholson underwent electroshock therapy during the scene in the film where his character does.

About Jack Nicholson:

Jack Nicholson wore stocking caps throughout the movie, because he had just gotten hair plugs implanted two months before shooting the film.

Russian President Valdimir Putin was lost for words when he encountered Jack Nicholson in Moscow. After overcoming his momentary loss for words he announced that his favorite film was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The movie was banned because the former Communist regime refused to acknowledge its director, Milos Forman, a Czech dissident. The film was an underground success in the Soviet Union and Putin along with others saw it as an individual’s right to fight against repressive governing systems.

About Ken Kesey:

Ken Kesey, author of the book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, claimed that he would never watch the movie version and even sued because it wasn’t filmed from Chief Bromden’s view (as the book was written).

Kesey developed the novel while he attended Stanford University as a graduate student in their Creative Writing program. The novel was partially inspired by Kesey's part-time job as an orderly in a Palo Alto veterans' hospital in California. It was also as a student at Stanford where Kesey began participating in experiments for the psychology department that involved the use of LSD. This use of LSD prompted Kesey to have hallucinations while working as an orderly. Kesey hallucinated seeing a large Indian mopping the floors of the hospital; this hallucination prompted Kesey to add the character Chief Bromden as the novel's narrator (Classic Notes).

Famous Quotes:

McMurphy: A little dab'll do ya.

McMurphy: I'm a goddamn marvel of modern science.

When McMurphy is counting votes for changing the TV channel to the World Series game, none of his fellow patients raise their hands for fear of defying Nurse Ratched. He asks them: Which one of you nuts has got any guts?

McMurphy: That's right, Mr. Martini. There is an Easter Bunny.

When McMurphy finds out that most of the patients are voluntary, he is shocked and disgusted. He asks young Billy Bibbit if he too is voluntary and when Billy replies yes, McMurphy says, "What are you doin’ here? You oughta be out in a convertible bird-doggin' chicks and bangin' beaver."

*All the above information was taken from Internet Movie Database (refer to Works Cited), unless otherwise cited.

No, it is not McMurphy who flew over the Cuckoo’s nest, or Harding, or Taber. It wasn’t Martini or Cheswick, or Bibbit, Chief Bromden or Bancini. The flight of crazies that flew over the Cuckoo’s nest was in the asylum, but they were not patients. The crazy people in this scenario were paid to be crazy. Nurse Ratched, Dr. John Spivey and other employees, like Washington, were paid each day to come into the asylum and inflict terrible doses of mental (and sometimes physical) pain on the so called "nuts" whose lives consisted of white hallways and white floors. McMurphy lost his life because he saw the truth in the asylum, the Cuckoo’s nest. He lost his life because he had not yet been in long enough to grow immune to the inhumane treatment that he received. He lost his life because he figured out who the real nuts were and, unlike the other patients, McMurphy still knew enough of justice to realize and want to erase the terrible injustice being done to the helpless patients inside the asylum. Being sent to the asylum just so he could be evaluated for mental illness, McMurphy ends up as a (mini) Christ for the other patients to follow, acting as his twelve disciples (Carnes 14).

Randall McMurphy is ushered through the hospital doors by two attendants dressed in white. Among the white walls and floors, McMurphy, wearing scuffed blue jeans, a black leather jacket and a black tight cap, represents a symbolic intrusion of the outside world entering this sterile, cold hospital. Upon entering the ward that is too become his final resting place, he jokes with the current patients, wears a devious smile and a deck of cards is rolled up in his sleeve. Immediately he questions the policy of the institution to require all the patients to take medicinal pills, regardless of their illness or ailment. In just these opening scenes of the movie, director Milos Forman has foreshadowed Randall McMurphy’s future: McMurphy enters the asylum wearing black, the color of death, and immediately he shows defiance against authority by questioning the medication, an indication of his rebellious role for the duration of the movie.

McMurphy’s first tense encounter with the clinical system is Nurse Ratched. She is cold, uncaring, and truly disinterested in the lives of the patients. She is concerned only with maintaining her undisputed control and authority over the men in the ward. Carnes writes (about the book) that Nurse Ratched sheaths her femininity in her mummy-like uniform and represses her womanness so much so that she appears as a machine to Chief Bromden (9). Forman, in the film however, does not make many attempts to float Nurse Ratched’s suppressed femininity to the surface. I believe that his reasons for not including this aspect of Kesey’s novel in the film is stated perfectly by McCreadie "the ward and the incidents that occur are so bizarre that they are difficult to believe or accept..." (128). Forman does not want to clutter the minds of the audience (with Nurse Ratched’s suppressed womanness) and risk marginalizing the importance of the struggle of the patients, which is the focus of the movie.

Randall subtly develops relationships with the other patients and encourages them to think for themselves. In one scene, he asks the other men in the therapy session to vote for watching the World Series instead of the regular TV programming. He rises up in the middle of the session and asks "Which one of you nuts has got any guts?" He is asking the others to join him in his deliberative attempt to undermine Nurse Ratched’s authority.

Forman presents this film and plot to us in a direct and straightforward manner. The camera will zoom in on a character without trying to hide the fact of its presence. As an audience member you can feel the camera moving forward and zooming in and are swayed to lean into the screen yourself.

As this film represents a microcosm of the injustices of the real world, Forman zooms in on characters during critical scenes of the movie to emphasize the character’s message. Forman says "As a spectator and naturally as a filmmaker I like to reveal the inside through the surface" (McCreadie 128). The simple movement of the cameras from one character to another continually supports this statement. The setting of the hospital is simple (white, white, white) and does not distract the reader from the actual plot. If anything the simpleness of the ward adds to the audiences’ sympathy for the patients and for McMurphy’s bold attempts to buck the rigid system. Forman forces his audience to endure and accept the harshness of the asylum as if they themselves were in the ward.

The movie deviates severely from the book in its matter of perspective. In the book, Chief Bromden, a deaf and dumb Indian, is the narrator and the story is told through his eyes. An omniscient camera that seems to follow the patients however narrates the movie. There is no outside force influencing how the events are interpreted. This unbiased point of view is how Forman wished it to be; he is known for his ability to accentuate realism within a film (Safer 132). In representing the asylum so openly and realistically, Forman opens himself up to criticism in misinterpreting the books theme: "a capsulized allegory of an increasingly mad reality" (Safer 132). Whereas Kesey reported that he would direct the film so that when the audience left, they wouldn’t be able to find the exit, Forman wanted to create characters that the audience might feel are realistically scary, not fictitiously monstrous.

Forman’s film is easy to watch. There is no more plot than need be to successfully represent the struggle of the patients against their oppressive clinical system. While Kroll argues that focusing on the conflict between Nurse Ratched and McMurphy creates thinned out supporting characters (65), I believe that for the purpose of filming, Forman needed to create this intense relationship between Ratched and Randall. He only had 133 minutes to show the asylum’s unforgiving oppressiveness and this hero-villain relationship is one that the audience can easily relate to. Nurse Ratched can be easily identified as a villain and McMurphy as the heroic rogue that defies her authority.

Film reviewer, Robert Hatch, does not feel that the brutal reality and the horrificness of the asylum was captured and refers to the movie as a fairy tale (574). He believes that Forman takes reality to an extreme and therefore makes the film an unreliable source on the treatment of patients in mental institutions. The basic theme that man is struggling and rising against his oppressive government or system is too basic for Hatch and he compares it to such movies as Alice in Wonderland (574). I feel that Hatch is not giving full consideration to the fact that the ward is truly harsh and degrading to the patients and that the staff serves as the ruling class, having final say over the patients’ futures.

This movie does not end as upbeat and enlightening as Alice in Wonderland. When McMurphy returns from receiving his second dose of electroshock therapy and a lobotomy, as punishment for his attempt to strangle Nurse Ratched to death, he is barely human. Two doctors tuck him into bed because he is too weak to do it himself. The system has beaten Randall McMurphy at the game of life. He lies like a vegetable in bed, oblivious to the outside world. He is not able to rebel against the doctors. He cannot lead the patients in a revolt. Chief Bromden sees that McMurphy’s future has been stolen, along with his manhood, and suffocates him to death with a pillow. McMurphy lies dead in bed. In dying this way, his memory is preserved among his fellow patients. He can die as a sort of martyr for the men in the little microcosm of a world inside the hospital walls. In one sense, McMurphy was crazy. It was optimistic and crazy to think that he could change such a system.

Works Cited

Carnes, B. Ken Kesey. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1974.

"ClassicNotes on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest." ClassicNotes by GradeSaver. 2000. GradeSaver. 4 May 2002 <http://www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/cuckoosnest/>.

Hatch, Robert. "Films." Nation 29 Nov. 1971: 573-574.

Internet Movie Database. 9 April 2002. Internet Movie Database Inc. Retrieved: 7 April 2002 <www.imdb.com>.

McCreadie, Marsha. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Some reasons for one happy adaptation." Literature/Film Quarterly 5(1977): 125-31.

Safer, Elaine B. "‘It’s the truth Even If It Didn’t Happen’: Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest." Literature/Film Quarterly 5 (1977): 132-141.

Zubizarreta, John. "The Disparity of Point of View." Literature/Film Quarterly 22 (1994): 62-69.