One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Miloš Forman (1975)
I quite often change my mind about a film. Watching Calvary on television last weekend, I struggled to understand what had so impressed me in the cinema three years ago (aside from Brendan Gleeson’s fine acting). I must have seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at least five times in the 1970s – many times fewer than Cabaret but more than any other movie in those years. The last time I’d watched Miloš Forman’s famous picture was on video, probably in the early 1990s; it’s now been re-released to mark Jack Nicholson’s eightieth birthday and Sally and I went to see it at BFI. I anticipated feeling nostalgic but maybe puzzled as to why the film was once such a big deal for me. In the event, I did feel nostalgia but amazement and excitement too. Forty years on, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is ardent and terrific.
Ken Kesey was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which drew on his experiences of working as a ward orderly in a mental hospital and of taking psychotropic drugs. Published in 1962 though written three years previously, the novel is both a powerful condemnation of conditions in US state mental institutions in the 1950s and, more broadly, a parable of the individual battling against a society intent on suppressing independence of thought and action. Randle Patrick McMurphy, a convicted criminal, feigns mental illness to get a transfer from prison to a mental hospital, which he assumes will be a cushy number and where he’s at first placed under observation. McMurphy is increasingly horrified by the docility of the other patients and the behaviour of a certain Nurse Ratched, who rules the ward he’s placed on with a rod of iron and a heart of stone. McMurphy’s sustained attempts to incite the others to assert their individuality brings him into increasing conflict with the hospital authorities and the ‘Big Nurse’ in particular. Their eventual solution is to silence the rebel by giving him a lobotomy. Although McMurphy and Nurse Ratched are protagonist and antagonist, the book’s narrator is ‘Chief’ Bromden, a Native American inmate of the hospital. The Chief, assumed by doctors and his fellow patients to be a deaf mute, is in fact keeping his own counsel and fully observant of all he sees. He finally escapes from the hospital.
The largely realistic style of the film, which retains Chief Bromden as a key character but dispenses with his narration, translates very effectively the book’s attack on the contemporary treatment of mental illness, whether in the routines of lulling medication or the administering of electroconvulsive therapy. Miloš Forman’s approach to the material doesn’t fully convey the further dimension of Kesey’s tirade, against what he sees as the conformist powers-that-be that control behaviour and constrain freedom of expression in American society as a whole. The screenplay, by Laurence Hauben and Bo Goldman, retains elements of this aspect of the source material – for example, the disclosure that most of those on the ward are voluntary patients and McMurphy’s failure to make good his escape from the institution when he has the chance. (He joins in the secret Christmas party-binge that he’s planned and falls asleep.) Revelations and incidents like these, although important moments in the movie, don’t, however, hint at a larger metaphorical meaning. The film is able to combine the reality and the political symbolism of Chief Bromden, thanks to the totemic presence of Will Sampson, the full-blood Creek who plays him. The episode that sees the towering Chief transform a basketball game between patients and staff – like the later sequence in which he proves he can speak, as he quietly thanks McMurphy for a piece of Juicy Fruit gum – is effective drama and delightful comedy. In the film’s final scenes, Chief Bromden, after mercy-killing the lobotomised McMurphy, uses his exceptional physical strength to release water from a hydrotherapy cart that McMurphy previously tried and failed to lift. In a stirring climax, the Chief picks up the cart, hurls it through the windows of the ward, runs out and into the night.
The clearest recalibration of the novel comes in Louise Fletcher’s portrait of Nurse Ratched (a name suggestive of both ratchet and rat shit). Kesey’s ‘Big Nurse’ is a bureaucratic battleaxe whose intimidation is illustrated in extreme physical terms – the huge breasts beneath her starched white uniform are meant to make her monstrous. Louise Fletcher’s blandly implacable Mildred Ratched isn’t obviously threatening. (I see from jottings about the film I made in the 1970s that I noted a facial resemblance between Fletcher and Shirley Temple Black.) The twin rolls of hair under her nurse’s cap are known as ‘Victory rolls’, according to online images of the same. The victory is presumably that of 1945: Louise Fletcher herself described the hairdo as ‘a symbol that life had stopped for [Nurse Ratched] a long time ago’. Fletcher’s interpretation is precise, unhysterical and insidious; her economy of expression reinforces Nurse Ratched’s adamantine quality. The quietly confident walk, the droning, decisive voice, the impervious, mask-like face – all indicate a self-containment that makes her, from the patients’ point of view, invincible. Yet although Fletcher’s playing is one of the most realistic ingredients in the film, she also, and remarkably, does capture the scope of Ken Kesey’s ‘Combine’, which runs the hospital (and American life). She suggests a woman who, as well as exerting authority within her own limited domain, is bound by obedience to a larger set of rules not of her making, perhaps beyond her understanding.
Louise Fletcher had been out of acting for a decade until she played Shelley Duvall’s mother in Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974). Although he watched the Altman film with an eye on the possibility of having Duvall play the role of Candy in Cuckoo’s Nest, Forman became interested in Fletcher instead – although it was a whole year before he finally cast her as Nurse Ratched. Bigger names including Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Colleen Dewhurst, Angela Lansbury and Geraldine Page are all supposed to have turned the role down in the meantime. It’s hard to imagine that any of them would have been as calmly, unshowily venomous as Louise Fletcher. The discipline Nurse Ratched imposes is ghastly but the self-discipline of Fletcher’s superb performance is admirable. Her lack of theatricality complements Jack Nicholson’s flamboyance extraordinarily well. The confrontation between the life force of McMurphy and this deathly adversary is intensely dramatic.
Nurse Ratched raises her voice occasionally but she loses her freezing self-control only in the scene in which McMurphy tries to strangle her for causing the death of another patient, the hapless Billy Bibbit. When a male nurse slugs McMurphy, he falls beside the semi-conscious Ratched, brushing her hair with his hand. At that odd moment of physical contact, they cease to be rebel and oppressor; they’re two exhausted people. The last time we see Nurse Ratched, she’s ensconced behind a glass partition, back at her microphone, bidding the patients goodnight as she prepares to go home. She’s wearing a surgical collar and her voice is hoarser but she’s still in charge. I remember being impressed in 1976 by Russell Davies’s Observer review of the film and I’m glad that I kept the following extract from it, in which Davies summarises the essential Jack Nicholson character and the consequently ready-made antagonism between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched:
‘McMurphy’s defiance is largely sexual. His refusal to swallow medication on the grounds that there might be saltpetre in it; his frequent panting mime of masturbation; his circulating of porno playing-cards among the inmates … fit in perfectly with the traditions of randiness and heedlessness of authority which Nicholson has created for himself as a star. At the institution, he confronts what must be, in the terms of these personal traditions, the ultimate enemy; the authoritarian female who is not sexually available.’
Kirk Douglas acquired the rights to Ken Kesey’s novel in 1962. It was adapted for the theatre by Dale Wasserman and staged on Broadway in late 1963, with Douglas in the lead. He then spent years trying and failing to interest a studio in a screen version. He eventually gave the rights to his son Michael, who, with Saul Zaentz, produced the film of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for United Artists. By then Kirk Douglas, in his late fifties, was too old to play McMurphy. His humour and zest for performance – along with a physical appearance akin to the brawny redhead created by Kesey – would have made a younger Douglas a good choice for the role. In the mid-1970s, though, he’d have seemed wrong for reasons other than age. While Kesey’s novel was a fairly early product of the American counterculture of the period, the film of Cuckoo’s Nest came at the tail end of it – not only post-Vietnam and post-Watergate but also in the wake of numerous and various hit countercultural movies (The Graduate, Easy Rider, M*A*S*H ). Kirk Douglas’s brand of heroism, combined with a tendency to excessive dynamism, would have seemed anachronistic.
Those disqualifying factors for Douglas hint at why Jack Nicholson was the perfect choice to play McMurphy. By 1975, he’d already created a gallery of portraits of outsiders – subversive, quick-tongued but vulnerable – in Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail and Chinatown. Nicholson had shown a genius for getting inside the heads, and expressing the feelings, of these romantic cynics. He was too hip to seem obviously energetic yet he played to audiences brilliantly. It’s important to remember that his particular talents and embodiment of the zeitgeist made Nicholson right for this role because, of course, it’s impossible now to imagine anyone else in it. His podgy physique – emphasised here when McMurphy is in wearing a short jacket and jeans – means that, from certain angles, Nicholson always finds it easy to look funny. The wit in his drawl and his eyes supplies humour of a very different kind. His transitions from laughing derision into seriousness and anger are perfectly believable. He holds the screen and makes you root for his character without visible effort. McMurphy, the star turn on the ward, is charismatic and extraordinary to the other patients. Jack Nicholson therefore has no need to subdue his own charisma as an actor. Perhaps most important, the combination of his naturalistic gifts and his sarcastic exuberance enables him, in this his greatest performance, to straddle and help unify the sometimes conflicting styles of the book and the film’s direction.
The quality of the acting throughout is exhilaratingly fresh – an impression that’s reinforced, it has to be said, by the fact that few of the cast went on to enjoy sustained big-time movie careers so haven’t become familiar in other memorable roles. The main exceptions to that are Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd; both among the patients here, their future success has mostly been in more straightforwardly comic roles. (DeVito plays the genially delusional Martini, Lloyd the angrily aggressive Taber.) Brad Dourif was making his screen debut as the stuttering, mother-dominated Billy Bibbit. Dourif went on to star in Wise Blood (1979) and has had smaller roles in films as major as Blue Velvet (1986) but he’s never surpassed his work here. As the name order in the opening credits suggests, William Redfield was a relatively big name at the time. Redfield died only months after the film’s release but his brilliant interpretation of the fussy, educated Dale Harding, who monopolises the group therapy sessions over which Nurse Ratched presides, is a fine memorial. Sydney Lassick is remarkable as the seriously infantile Charlie Cheswick, Harding’s browbeaten acolyte until Cheswick transfers allegiance to ‘bull goose’ McMurphy. The other members of the core group on the ward are William Duell (as the epileptic Jim Sefelt) and Vincent Schiavelli (as his sad-eyed buddy, Bruce Frederickson).
The patients’ personalities are, for the most part, detailed gradually rather than through startling incident. Billy Bibbit is something of an outlier in this respect; and his suicide, or at least the events that precede it, perhaps expose the clash between Ken Kesey’s and Miloš Forman’s temperaments. The moment when Billy, after losing his virginity, also briefly loses his speech impediment and answers Nurse Ratched back, is affecting yet it feels phony in Forman’s carefully realised world. Dean Brooks, the superintendent of the Oregon State Hospital where the film was shot, is excellent as Dr Spivey, the hospital medical director in the story – even if his benignly intelligent air also seems incongruous in the paranoid scheme created by Kesey.
If the novel were adapted for the screen now, how would the result be different? If the film-makers wanted to retain the misogyny and sexism of the Ken Kesey material, they would feel compelled to opt for a less naturalistic style than Forman did. The polarised women in the story are either martinets or sex objects. The first category includes, besides Nurse Ratched, the relatively innocuous Nurse Pilbow (Mimi Sarkisian), a hatchet-faced night supervisor (Kay Lee) and the unseen but influential Mrs Bibbit. When the patients, under McMurphy’s leadership, briefly escape en masse from the hospital and hijack a boat, Candy (Marya Small), a prostitute the hero knows, comes along too, to supply McMurphy with what he needs. She and her friend Rose (Louisa Moritz) are later smuggled onto the ward for the late-night Christmas party and, in Candy’s case, to go to bed with Billy, at McMurphy’s request.
It’s only to be expected that the few African-American characters have menial jobs in the hospital. More problematic is that the biddable night orderly Turkel seems to reinforce ancient racial stereotypes, though Scatman Crothers makes him entertaining. A twenty-first century Cuckoo’s Nest would also be nervous, I think, about seeming to make fun of the mentally ill. Returning to the film after more than two decades, I didn’t find this a serious problem – not least because the characterisations are so rich and sympathetic that you’re soon responding to the peculiarities and interactions of individuals. Even so, there’s little doubt that several of the actors were cast for their extraordinary appearance – and no point denying that in the 1970s audiences would have laughed more freely than they would now at people who looked and/or sounded ‘funny’. (It took time for the BFI audience last week to dare to laugh at the patients’ antics.)
Haskell Wexler’s subtle lighting of the hospital ward picks up warm oranges and innocuous greens, which don’t seem ominous until combined with the soporific Muzak that accompanies ‘medication time’. In spite of its distinctive setting, the film is an insight into institutionalisation – the hierarchies and routines on which it feeds – more largely. Jack Nitzsche’s plangent, appealing score is used sparingly and well. It’s played to eerie effect (on a bowed saw and wineglasses) with the opening titles, and rises to a memorable crescendo in the closing scene. Like several of his actors, Miloš Forman hasn’t subsequently come close to matching the achievement of Cuckoo’s Nest (not, at any rate, in Hair, Ragtime, Amadeus or Man on the Moon) but this film set the bar high. He has a first-rate screenplay to help him but Forman’s storytelling is admirably secure. This kind of narrative clarity and strength has become rare over the years and it’s a main reason why One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest remains an outstanding film drama. In the mid-1970s, it seemed a classic in terms of quality. It’s great to discover in 2017 that it’s also a classic in terms of enduring worth.
25 April 2017