Rating: 3½ stars (out of 4)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975): Dir. Milos Forman.  Written by: Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman.  Based upon the novel of the same name by Ken Kesey.  Starring: Jack Nicholson, Louis Fletcher, Will Sampson, Brad Dourif, and Christopher Lloyd.  Rated R for violence, language, and brief nudity.  Running time: 133 minutes.

Perhaps unaware of the comparisons, the Academy awarded Best Picture to this Jack Nicholson starring vehicle set in a mental asylum.  Fitting that the film that challenges institutions was simultaneously honored by one.

Nicholson plays R.P. McMurphy, a convict handed a relatively light sentence who feigns insanity to trade jail for the loony bin.  But this “cushy” prison life won’t be as easy as he thought—he has to contend with the diabolical Nurse Ratched, a medical professional whose need for routine borders on the…well, insane.

Good as Fletcher is as Ratched, it’s the patients I remember the most.  McMurphy gives them the closest thing to love they’ve ever known, but their bonds happen gradually and without excessive sentiment.  As he leads the inmates on wild flights of fancy, they learn to live beyond their simple lives (most are there by choice rather than committed).  Forman and his screenwriters walk a delicate tightrope between both the dangers and cathartic freedoms that McMurphy presents.

Nicholson is at the top of his game here—he treats his plight like a self-deprecating comedian, a guy who just encounterd a speed bump on his way to eternal debauchery.  Along with Will Sampson as the enigmatic “Chief” and Brad Dourif (in perhaps the only non-creepy role he’s ever played) as the stuttering Billy Bibbit, they invest us more in the material than the material itself.  It’s easy to get wrapped up in the joys and growth of the inmates, but the film sometimes settles for whimsical montages over small moments of growth.  It might also have been nice to learn more about Ratched or the other hospital workers—instead, we see them as instruments of an unfair institution.

Still, such a memorable film deserves credit for its commentary on complacency in a crazy world.  You’d have to be nuts not to enjoy it.

Next film: Rocky, 1976