Word: cuckooed
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...Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ken Kesey's bughouse drama stagified. A few critics call the dramatization hackwork but some Kesey fans swear...
...keep from being a loser. Given half a chance, I suspect that Miss Minnelli might have had the range for such a part--but that half a chance isn't given her. Instead she is forced into another replay of the kooky Pookie Adams she played in The Sterile Cuckoo--a spirited, imaginative unhappy little girl who's never recovered from the debilitating effects of an unloving father. Only in her musical numbers and in one comic scene--a teaparty meeting between the theatrically slutty Miss Minnelli and a proper Jewish girl (Marisa Berenson)--is she able to project...
...Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey's novel, a woman is used as the symbolic agent of a vindictively oppressive social system. The autocratic nurse who orders the rebel hero of the asylum lobotomized is intellectually presented as conformity's tool in crushing individualists. The emotional line of the play, however, suggests that the hero's real crime is machismo. He is, in effect, being castrated by a neurotic, sex-starved spinster in an acute fit of penis envy...
Director Alan Pakula (The Sterile Cuckoo) still has a tendency to go soft on his characters, but his camera eye and his sense of the rhythm of a scene (strongly abetted by Editor Carl Lerner) have improved considerably. His talent with actors seems now beyond contention, and under his guidance Jane Fonda gives her best performance to date. A couple of years ago, in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, she brought power to a part in which she was basically miscast. In Klute she is profoundly and perfectly Bree: she makes all the right choices, from the mechanics...
...rusty fire escapes. All these things, lit by the glare of burning cars and the flash of pot or amphetamine, are the backdrop to one of the best fictional studies of madness, descent and purification that any American has written since Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Donald Newlove clearly set out to write a first novel about demoniac society. He has produced a combined morality play and grimoire, or devil's hornbook, in which every creature is experienced with hilarious or dreadful concreteness...