One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Upon arrival at a mental institution, a brash rebel rallies the patients together to take on the oppressive Nurse Ratched, a woman more a dictator than a nurse.

• Director: Milos Forman
• Genre:Drama
• Runtime:134 minutes

Cast

Michael Berryman: Ellis
Peter Brocco : Col. Matterson
Dean R. Brooks : Dr. Spivey
Alonzo Brown : Miller
Scatman Crothers: Turkle

Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a recidivist criminal serving a short sentence on a prison farm for statutory rape, is transferred to a mental institution. This is a ploy to avoid hard labor and serve the rest of his sentence in a more relaxed environment. He is anti-authoritarian with a history of violence, but he exhibits no signs of mental illness.

McMurphy’s ward in the mental institution is run by a calm but unyielding tyrant, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) who employs a combination of subtle humiliation in group therapy, punishment disguised as unpleasant medical treatments and a mind-numbing daily routine. McMurphy finds that the other male and mostly-middle-aged patients are more institutionalized and afraid of Ratched than they are focused on becoming functional in the outside world. McMurphy befriends patients Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif), a stuttering young man, and “Chief” Bromden (Will Sampson), a silent 6 feet 7 inches (2.01 m) tall Native American, Charles Cheswick (Sydney Lassick), a man disposed to childish fits of temper, Martini (Danny DeVito), who is delusional, and Dale Harding (William Redfield), a high-strung, well-educated patient. Believed by the patients and staff to be a deaf-mute, Chief is mostly ignored but is respected because of his size, at which McMurphy marvels at first sight.

McMurphy baits Nurse Ratched at first merely to amuse himself, but he intensifies his efforts to loosen her control. Rather than have McMurphy transferred, Ratched bides her time and increasingly asserts power. McMurphy gambles with the other patients, acting as dealer and humorously narrating and entertaining them, while draining their petty cash accounts and their allotments of cigarettes. To break the monotony, McMurphy calls for votes on ward policy changes: watching a World Series baseball game on the television on the ward, and a pickup game of basketball against the orderlies. Then he makes a show of betting the other patients that he can lift an old hydrotherapy console—a massive and still-connected marble plumbing fixture—off the floor of the ward, and loses, storming out and delivering the line “Well, at least I tried.” McMurphy then learns that Ratched has the power to keep him involuntarily committed to the ward indefinitely, as the more sympathetic ward psychiatrist, while nominally her supervisor, is a figurehead. He accuses the voluntary patients on the ward of deliberately neglecting to let him know this. Read more