Word: asylums
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...furious, hysterical Concettina (Elena Fiore) and brought to justice. A man of vocal but flexible honor, Pasqualino will not cop a plea of insanity until he understands that the only alternative is the death penalty. With a little help from the don, Pasqualino draws twelve years in an asylum...
...SICK LITTLE girl in a woman's body, Empress Phylissa doesn't know her powers. Drooling, a finger hooked over her lower lip, the beauty never guesses that her bedroom's an asylum. She makes you wrench, as do all the characters in The Polish Mime Ballet Theatre's The Menagerie of Empress Phylissa performed last week at the Loeb...
...Kesey's book the reader was bludgeoned into taking McMurphy's side because the asylum doctors were insufferable authority-figures intent on sadistically enforcing their will on a group of harmless human beings too weak to resist them. The facts are changed in the movie, though you're still expected to side with McMurphy. The clinic seems relatively well-run, with no sadism apparent. Dr. Spivey, played by a real asylum shrink, is rather like a Harvard administrator in his comfortable chumminess, generous desire to do good and general inability to see how to do it. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher...
...Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is part of an emerging American state of mind, as well as a hang-over of the burnt-out sixties. Taken as a metaphor, it suggests a revolution in the asylum in which the doctors and nurses are overthrown and the inmates reign over all. As a political metaphor it attempts to identify the lot of the oppressed with the lot of the incapable. Even Animal Farm deals with the same theme in a much more complex way. McMurphy's ethic of fuck and fight is hardly a more desirable...
...particularly since they have been so over-used by the very people who might be expected to agree with the premises of this film. In the first place, the whole tenor and action of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is sexist. McMurphy sees his treatment in the asylum as emasculating and his favorite response to the greyhaired doctors is to startle them with crude '50s locker-room talk. The feminine principle represented by the nurses is that of order--but order conceived of pettiness, primness, and bitchiness, all summed in Nurse Ratched's threat to "tell your mother...