One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, one of the most significant films of the 'Seventies became the first movie to win all four major Oscars - Best Film, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher) and Best Director (Milos Forman) - since It Happened One Night, in 1934. It also picked up 1976's British Academy Award for Best Film. Ironically, the film, made in 1975, had taken over a decade to reach the screen. An adaptation by Dale Wasserman of Ken Kesey's novel had been presented as a Broadway play in 1963, and the screen rights had been sold to Kirk Douglas, who had, however, never managed to get the project off the ground. It was his son Michael who finally produced the film, demonstrating a marvellously sure touch in the process. His choice of Jack Nicholson to play the misfit prisoner/patient proved to be an inspired one. Nicholson's portrait of McMurphy, the patient who leads his fellow inmates in a mental hospital to rebel against the rule-bound Nurse Ratched, is a virtuoso piece of acting, hugely impressive in both its humour and its understated steel core. Providing the ideal antagonist for Nicholson is Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched whose smiling, unruffled and patient manner effectively conceals - until it is required - her ruthless determination to crush any hint of individuality or spirit in the men in her charge. The film comes alight during the tense encounters between the icy nurse and the open-hearted McMurphy. Czechoslovakian director Forman, (whose previous native films had included the excellent The Fireman's Ball and The Loves of a Blonde, and one American feature Taking Off) orchestrates the proceedings with immense feeling and control, deploying his whole cast with such skill as to make one believe in the whole business. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest can be seen as a funny, moving and harrowing film, or as a metaphor of the state and its laws. But either way, it is magnificent entertainment and quite unmissable.