One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

I remember in high school having to read this book in Junior English class and then we subsequently watched the movie. At the time most of what I remember of the movie is that we thought that some of the characters in the mental hospital were quite funny.

Recently I watched the movie for what was the first time in thirty years and it really was quite a revalation. Not just the movie itself but a few different things.

The movie based on the book of same name by sixties icon Ken Kesey won multiple Oscars in 1975 including Best Picture, Director, Actor and Actress. Louise Fletcher playing the terrible nurse ratchet won the Best Actress Oscar. Her portrayal upon this watching is for me offers more depth and is not a totally unidentifiable character. Jack Nicholson for as long as I can remember has been considered a great actor, but with at least to my estimation no real movies to back that up. Sure he was over the top good in A Few Good Men but that role was all but a caricature.

In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest however we see a shining example of Nicholson's talent. Playing Randle McMurphy he is a tour de force. McMurphy in prison is tired of the work farm and is pleased as punch to be getting what he calls easy duty at the nuthouse. As he makes friends with the various inmates in his ward he comes to feel sadly for them and also angry at what he deems the pointless intransigence of Nurse Ratchet. In one early scene he steals out the gate, commandeers a bus that has come to take the better behaved inmates on an outing and loading the bus with his friends, after picking up a party girl friend of his takes them fishing on a stolen boat. As he says however what can they do to him. What he does not understand and soon finds out is that now that he is in the mental health system he is not automatically released at the end of his scheduled prison sentence.

This, as one might expect, does not sit well and McMurphy causes as scene that eventually leads to him and two other patients being taken upstairs for electroshock therapy.

Watching the movie this time I could not help but but be stunned at the performance of Will Sampson as the Chief. The Chief is a towering man, close to seven feet tall who is , as the saying goes, deaf and dumb, consequently spending his days pushing a broom aimlessly. Early in the movie McMurphy, wanting to use the Chief's height for easy baskets attempts to teach him to play basketball. It does not work. Eventually however as Randall treats the Chief with respect the Chief comes to trust Randall and the next time we see a basketball game on the court. Something magical happens in this game. Randall again sets up the Chief under the hoop and when he passes the ball to the Chief he, without jumping, just pushes it to the hoop for an easy basket. One could call it a an early sixties flatfooted alley oop and it works. After a couple of these the Chief, if it is possible, grows even taller, and you see him not stumble down the court but run the length of it to set up for defense. As one might imagine a seven foot Indian is quite a presence in a pick up basketball game at a mental hospital. From there the Chief still not speaking and unable to understand language grows close to McMurphy to the point where he is one of the three sent upstairs for shock treatment as he had defended McMurphy when his trouble turned physical.

After returning from shock treatment McMurphy would like to be good but his distaste for Nurse Ratchet makes that impossible. He sets up an escape plan that is a little too efficient and leads to some events that will change everybody's life forever. The ending of this movie is sad and moving and again we are left with the understanding that The Chief is the moral center of this movie in ways that are not understood with a passing viewing.

I mentioned Nurse Ratchet as not, in this viewing, to me at least being the all evil character we often think about when we think of the movie. One must understand that in 1962 the world was a different place. Kesey was one of the major counter cultural figures of the sixties and there was not much room for nuance in his portrayal of Ratchet but nuance there is. You could realize that here she was a nurse running a ward, trying to follow a schedule, and you get this career petty criminal who comes in and causes trouble. Clearly she reacted in a way that was authoritarian but I do not think in a real world situation she was necessarily evil.

It was Kesey's story and of course Milos Forman directed the movie the same way and Ratchet has become an iconic example of a dictatorial, by the book, female authority figure.

Now that my commercial for understanding of Nurse Ratchet is over the one thing that one should take away is that this is a great film. Lasser as Ratchet has depth, Nicholson fills the screen in every scene, and many of the actors, including a young Danny Devito became faces that we are all well familiar with. And of course The Chief.

A great film.