One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

A film set in a mental hospital. McMurphy comes from prison. He faked illness to be transferred instead of serving his sentence, and the plan worked. The ward has an order. Medication times, group therapy, votes, a music feed left on, and Nurse Ratched running all of it. McMurphy breaks the order. He plays cards, takes bets, forces a vote about watching a game, and one day puts the patients on a bus and takes them fishing. From there the film is a contest of power. Ratched never shouts; she wins without raising her voice, by following the rules and by shaming. There is also a Chief on the ward. He has not spoken to anyone for years and everyone thinks he is deaf. What the narrative is interested in is not mental illness but obedience: most of the patients are not held by force, they are there voluntarily, and McMurphy is astonished when he finds out. That is the hardest piece of information in the film: the door is open and nobody leaves. The last section starts with a party at night, and something that happens there ends everything. It was shot in a real hospital and the institution's superintendent appears in the film; some of the extras were staff and patients there. The novelist Ken Kesey opposed the adaptation. The book is narrated by the Chief and the film dropped that; he said he never watched it. The production won all five of the major Academy Awards, only the second time in the history of cinema. Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd are in the cast. Miloš Forman directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants performance and a critique of institutions. Who it is not for: anyone looking for hope; the ending is merciless and offers no relief.