Based on the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey, the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is currently receiving its 50-year anniversary treatment: a re-release into theaters.
From the AMC description: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tells the story of a free-spirited rogue who takes over the ward of a mental hospital by a combination of chutzpah and ingenuity…Using the madhouse to symbolize the individual against the system, the story gets its power from its unforgettable ensemble of characters and accretion of details that reveal what life is about inside a mental institution.”
That “rogue” is Jack Nicholson‘s Randle Patrick McMurphy, who’s faking mental illness in order to avoid prison. Many other patients, who do have actual issues, are there on a voluntary basis. The “system” is represented by the authoritarian Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). (See this previous post about Cuckoo’s Nest TV spinoff Ratched.)
By the way, per Catherine Bouris, thedailybeast.com: Another TV spinoff, this one honoring Kesey’s original intent, is in our future. “Kesey disavowed the Miloš Forman-directed film at the time of its release because it diverged from his novel; the novel is told from Chief’s point of view…” Chief, diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, is one of the few involuntary commitments at the “cuckoo’s nest.”
Below are further observations regarding the film version, intended for those who’ve already seen it.
Vincent Canby, New York Times, 1975: “I suspect that we are meant to make connections between Randle’s confrontation with the oppressive Nurse Ratched and the political turmoil in this country in the 1960’s. The connection doesn’t work. All it does is conveniently distract us from questioning the accuracy of the film’s picture of life in a mental institution where shock treatments are dispensed like aspirins and lobotomies are prescribed as if the mind’s frontal lobes were troublesome wisdom teeth.”
Stephen Seager, MD, Psychology Today, 2014: “Only Randall Patrick McMurphy received court mandated treatment and, as an obvious sociopath, he should have been discharged forthwith.”
[My own note: See this post on sociopathy.]
Troy Rondinone, PhD, Psychology Today, 2018 : “…(T)he problem, as numerous studies demonstrate, is that mental hospitals are portrayed so negatively that many people suffering mental illness decline to seek treatment. Carrie Fisher captured this vividly when recounting her own resistance to getting help. Though doctors recommended ECT for her depression, ‘My only exposure to it was Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…From the seizures to the biting down on a stick to the convulsions, it looked traumatic, dangerous, and humiliating. I mean what do we know for certain about it? Aren’t there a bunch of risks? What if something goes wrong and my brain blows up?’ These are Hollywood-nurtured fears.
Fisher ultimately decided to undergo electroconvulsive treatment. It was, she explained, either ‘ECT or DOA’.”
Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com, 2003: “The movie’s simplistic approach to mental illness is not really a fault of the movie, because it has no interest in being about insanity. It is about a free spirit in a closed system…”
“It…achieves its success by deliberately choosing to use the mental patients as comic caricatures. This decision leads to the fishing trip, which is at once the most popular, and the most false, scene in the movie. It is McMurphy’s great joyous thumb in the eye to Ratched and her kind, but the energy of the sequence cannot disguise the unease and confusion of men who, in many cases, have no idea where they are, or why.”
Daniel O’Brien, The Conversation, 2025: “Forman’s film achieves the seemingly impossible by having the audience root for a morally corrupt character (McMurphy’s convictions include statutory rape). This detail is mentioned just once, early in the film, and is seemingly forgotten in order to reorient him as an unlikely saviour, rather than unsavoury character.”
