Day 28: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Movie #9 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) - 133 min, cert 18.

This movie is about R. P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a habitual criminal currently serving a sentence for statutory rape. He thinks that it might be easier to serve out his time in a psychiatric hospital than a prison so has decided to pretend to be mad. He soon finds out, however, that although the rules are less strict, some of the usual privileges that he is used to are no longer available. The ward is rules over by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), a domineering matriarchal woman who believes that the rules are there for the patients’ benefit and must be strictly adhered to. McMurphy has a problem with rules and authority and clashes with Nurse Ratched at every possible opportunity.

There’s more to Ratched than this though. It’s as if she doesn’t actually want her patients to get better. She enjoys the feeling of superiority she gets when she’s putting them down and laying down the law to them. This becomes most clear at the end of film in her confrontation with Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif). Billy is a painfully shy and insular young man, but due to McMurphy’s influence, he stands up to her after being caught breaking the rules. However, she can’t accept this, and knowing exactly which buttons to push, reduces him back to his usual stuttering self.

Of course, psychiatric medicine has taken huge leaps forward since this movie was made, so the film in general has lost a lot of its relevancy, and this does detract from the film a certain amount. But the main reason people watch, and love, this film is Nicholson’s performance. If someone else had played the role of McMurphy, it would probably have been average at best. But the sheer exuberance and wild abandon that he brings to role make the film come alive.

I enjoyed the movie, but not massively so. It’s starting to look a little dated so I’ll just score it 6/10.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.      Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.      The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

4.      Schindler’s List (1993)

5.      Inception (2010)

6.      12 Angry Men (1957)

7.      The Godfather (1972)

8.      The Godfather: Part II (1974)

9.      One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Next up is The Dark Knight, which will be the second film so far that I haven’t seen before, so I don’t really know what to expect.