One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
is perhaps the best-known antiauthority film in history. The film’s
director, Milos Forman, was well acquainted with repressive authority,
having experienced it firsthand for much of his life. Born outside
of Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1932, Forman
lost both his parents to the Nazi death camps of World War II. When
he began making films in the mid-1960s, a
brief flourish of Czech political and artistic freedom allowed him
to explore daily life through satire, and he helped develop what
the French call cinéma vérité (truthful cinema),
an influential style based on realism and lacking traditional heroes. Forman’s Loves
of a Blonde was nominated for an Academy Award for Best
Foreign Language Film in 1966, and his Fireman’s
Ball received the same recognition in 1967.
However, communist authorities labeled Fireman’s Ball as
a threat and banned the film. One year later, while Forman was visiting
Paris, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Forman never returned
to his homeland, but the image of Soviet tanks rolling into his
country continued to haunt him and echoes throughout his work on One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Based on the popular 1962 novel
by Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest initially
was adapted as a Broadway play. Its star, Kirk Douglas, bought the
film rights and tried unsuccessfully for twelve years to generate
interest from Hollywood in making the movie. When he felt too old
to play the role of the protagonist, McMurphy, Douglas assigned
the rights to his son, Michael. After securing private financing,
Michael Douglas coproduced the film with Saul Zaentz of Fantasy
Records. They went on to earn Oscars as producers—a first for Michael
Douglas—when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest won
the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1975.
The producers chose Forman as director for his ability
to capture the concerns of the times. His American film debut, Taking
Off (1971), was a comedy about the
lack of understanding between young people and their parents. The
generation gap was a popular theme in the 1960s
and 1970s, as the American people, especially young
people, began questioning all manners of authority, old-fashioned
institutions, and the social status quo. The civil rights movement
and the anti–Vietnam War protests of the 1960s
morphed into the campus demonstrations, violent antidraft protests,
and women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
In a particularly transforming event of the times, National Guardsmen
opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University in 1970,
following a rock-throwing incident, and killed four students. A
few years later, American faith in authority was further shaken
by the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, which led to
the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in its antiauthority stance,
resonated strongly with these and other events of the 1970s.
Pauline Kael, movie critic for The New Yorker,
said that the film came along when the right metaphor for the human condition
was a loony bin.
Nearly all the top U.S. film critics gave the film positive
reviews, heaping particular praise on Jack Nicholson’s portrayal
of McMurphy. Their reservations related to the film’s simplification
of themes in Kesey’s novel. Kesey, for his part, never wanted to
see the film. He was so upset by the film’s choice not to use another
character, Chief Bromden, as narrator of the story that he sued
the producers. Nonetheless, the film succeeded with the public at
the box office: made with a budget of $3 million, Cuckoo’s
Nest grossed $112 million after
release. At the 1975 Academy Awards, the
film won the five top honors—Best Picture, Best Director (Milos
Forman), Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher),
and Best Adapted Screenplay (Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben). It
was the first film to sweep the top five Oscars since 1934’s It
Happened One Night.
Although Louise Fletcher’s portrayal of Nurse Ratched
proved Oscar-worthy, many of Hollywood’s leading actresses, including Jane
Fonda, Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Page,
and Angela Lansbury, had turned down the role. The character of
Nurse Ratched may have been unattractive because both Kesey’s novel
and the Broadway play portrayed her as a castrating female determined
to rob men of their masculinity—a stereotype to which the women’s
liberation movement of the 1970s objected.
However, when the film was being made, the screenwriters, producers,
director, and actress together altered the portrayal of Nurse Ratched
into a broader figure of institutional authority without such sexist
overtones. When Fletcher, in her first starring role, earned an
Oscar for her portrayal of Nurse Ratched, some of those who declined
the role admitted they had made a career mistake. Fletcher furnished
one of the award ceremony’s most memorable moments when she used
sign language to thank her deaf parents.
Although Milos Forman’s work is filled with people injured
by society, he often relies upon humor to portray the ordinary humanity
of these damaged souls. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,
he presents the inmates of a mental hospital as quirky and funny
in the midst of outrage. Forman’s characters are individual human
beings capable of displaying great dignity. He relies upon techniques
from his roots in cinéma vérité to create the look
and feel of reality—an especially noteworthy approach in light of
the fact that the novel is quite hallucinatory and the stage play
used a surrealistic set design to underscore the madness. Forman
set the story in a real mental institution in Oregon, cast the institution’s
administrator as the doctor in the film, and used actual patients
as extras. In the pivotal role of Chief Bromden, Forman cast a nonactor,
a full-blooded member of the Creek tribe working as a park ranger
near Salem. Through realism, humor and humanism, Forman transforms
the story to better express the tenor of its time.
Following his success with Cuckoo’s Nest, Forman
directed the film version of the popular counterculture musical Hair (1979),
followed by Ragtime (1981), Amadeus (1984), Valmont (1989), The People
vs. Larry Flynt (1996), and Man
on the Moon (1999). Although Amadeus won
eight Oscars in 1984, including Best Picture
and another Best Director award for Forman, critics generally acknowledge One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to be his foremost work. In
November 1977, the American Film Institute
voted it into its Top Ten of America’s Best Films, along with Casablanca, Gone With
the Wind, and Citizen Kane.
