100 All-Time Films (To see the entire list, click here)
Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
One of three films to win the Big 5 at the Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay) along with It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs. The film features great characters and an amazing juxtaposition between Jack Nicholson’s R.P. McMurphy and Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched. I do think the film has some flaws; it is very schematic and obvious with its programmed metaphors to be completely moving, but the human qualities of the characters are so good that it doesn’t really matter.
Nicholson gives arguably his best performance in a stellar career (even though I’d argue Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, and About Schmidt). It’s the typical Jack that we know and love. We get to see a young Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd play wackos. We also get introduced to Chief, the sidekick to McMurphy that plays savior. Ah, Juicy Fruit…
It’s a fun film that takes us into a place rarely shown with such accuracy in cinema, a mental hospital. We see the disparity between the staff and patients and we inherently root for the mental patients. The story is a constant spectacle of ‘one-ups’ between Ratched and McMurphy. McMurphy will take control of the situation, Ratched will knock him down a few pegs, only to see him rise above her again moments. That game is the beauty of the film for me.
It may not be the most original, thought-provoking, or technically savvy film but it definitely found a place in peoples’ hearts for us to continue discussing it 35 years later. It did so for me.
