One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

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

uuid: 3B642460-21E5-4EAD-B766-E06FD38DCBAD
upc: 0085393622220
title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
theatricalDate: 30-11-1974
purchase date: 16-07-2006
publisher: Warner Home Video
published: 17-12-1997
price: $14.98
net Rating: 5
MPAA Rating: R
minutes: 133
last lookup time: 174733188.64733
genre: Drama
fullTitle: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
features: Closed-captioned Color Dolby Full Screen Letterboxed Widescreen NTSC 1.85:1
director: Milos Forman
currentValue: $8.18
created: 174732158.581235
country: us
aspect: DVD
asin: 0790732181