One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest          

By Jim Emerson

One of the key movies of the Super70s, 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, 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.

Academy Awards

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest received Academy Awards for Best Picture (Saul Zaentz - Producer, Michael Douglas - Producer), Actor (Jack Nicholson), Actress (Louise Fletcher), Writing (Best Screenplay adapted from other material; Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman), Supporting Actor (Brad Dourif), and Directing (Milos Forman). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest also received Academy Awards nominations for Cinematography (Haskell Wexler, Bill Butler), Film Editing (Richard Chew, Lynzee Klingman, Sheldon Kahn), and Music Scoring Awards (Best Original Score; Jack Nitzsche).

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		Your Memories Shared!

"All I remember about this movie is that my father was watching it on video,and the whole time he said things like " This is what is going to happen to you if your bad". So I a way he scared me for life! I have never watched it since!" --tt