Amazon.com Essentials:
One of the key movies of the 1970s, 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 for 1976, 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.
--Jim Emerson
Amazon.com Essentials:
One of the key movies of the 1970s, 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 for 1976, 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.
--Jim Emerson
