When free-spirited petty crook Randle P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) arrives at the state mental hospital, his contagious sense of disorder jolts the routine. Soon he's on one side of a brewing war; soft spoken, coolly monstrous Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) is on the other. At stake is the fate of every patient on the ward…
Milos Forman's electrifying adaptation of Ken Kesey's acclaimed best seller swept all five major 1975 Academy Awards: Best Picture (produced by Saul Zaentz and Michael Douglas), Actor (Nicholson), Actress (Fletcher), Director (Milos Forman) and Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman). Raucous, moving and with a superb cast that includes Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd in his film debut, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest simply soars.
Accolades
Best Picture Oscar Winner 1975.
Best Picture Golden Globe Winner 1975.
Best Picture BAFTA Winner 1977.
Review
One of the key movies of the 1970s, when exciting, groundbreaking, personal films were still being made in Hollywood, Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest emphasized the humanistic story at the heart of Ken Kesey's more hallucinogenic novel. Jack Nicholson was born to play the part of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the rebellious inmate of a psychiatric hospital who fights back against the authorities' cold attitudes of institutional superiority, as personified by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). It's the classic antiestablishment tale of one man asserting his individuality in the face of a repressive, conformist system--and it works on every level. Forman populates his film with memorably eccentric faces, and gets such freshly detailed and spontaneous work from his ensemble that the picture sometimes feels like a documentary. Unlike a lot of films pitched at the "youth culture" of the 1970s, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest really hasn't dated a bit, because the qualities of human nature that Forman captures--playfulness, courage, inspiration, pride, stubbornness--are universal and timeless. The film swept the Academy Awards for 1976, winning in all the major categories (picture, director, actor, actress, screenplay) for the first time since Frank Capra's It Happened One Night in 1931. --Jim Emerson