Word: kesey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Grant for Shampoo, George Burns for The Sunshine Boys) were honored for supporting performances in films made snugly within the studio system. Cuckoo, distributed by United Artists, took 14 years to get together and took off on a battered wing and a profane prayer. Movie rights to Ken Kesey's intricate, explosive 1962 novel had been owned by Kirk Douglas for well over a decade. Douglas had played the role of the roustabout McMurphy on Broadway, and wanted to make the movie himself. There were no backers. Prospective producers were put off by the requisite casting of Douglas...
...mental health or I'll kill you." One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a residue of that mid-sixties sentiment. Like the button it makes a sick kind of sense, though its message is, finally, silly and, in a simplistic way, evil. Only under flower-child aegis (Kesey's book was celebrated by Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg and other gurus) could a 1975 audience be fed such sexist, crypto-fascist garbage. In the end, it's nothing more than pop psychology on the level of a counter-cultural Reader's Digest. Unless people take it seriously, in which...
...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...
Sexless Nag. McMurphy is an ambiguous character whose motives are never quite clear. Like revolutionaries who operate on a larger political stage, McMurphy may be acting out of idealism or he may have found a socially acceptable cover for profound psychopathy−or both. Kesey also understood that a belief in the possibility of rebellion is essential to modern man, a fallback position that can be taken up when despair threatens to turn into self-destruction. It is to restore that faint possibility for his fellow inmates that McMurphy ultimately acts without understanding what he is doing. The revolt...
...realize, in documentary fashion, the ugly surfaces of asylum life. One Flew over the Cuckoo 's Nest is an earnest attempt to make a serious film. But in the end the movie backs away from both the human reality and the cloudy but potent symbolism that Ken Kesey found in the asylum...