Word: kesey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Heart Beat that he demanded he be dropped entirely. "They wanted to have someone named Allen Ginsberg speak lines I never said," he says. "I wouldn't have minded if they put something intelligent in my mouth, but it sounded like third-rate beatnik poetry." Adds Novelist Ken Kesey, another friend of the trio: "I believe in dead rights, that no one has a right to mess with a guy, use Humphrey Bogart to sell batteries on TV, just because he's dead...
...conversation disappointed me. Everything Ginsberg talked about was dead and gone; Kerouac, who depicted Ginsberg as Carlo Marx in his novel, On the Road, is dead; so is Neal Cassidy. Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters have since faded into twilight...
Some of those defects pertain to structure and language, but Equus' main drawback is its philosophical thrust. Like so many other trendy writers, from R.D. Laing to Ken Kesey, Shaffer wonders whether madness may be a greater virtue than sanity in a sterile modern world. In Equus, madness is personified by Alan Strang (Peter Firth), a pretty, blond youth whose sexual desire for horses drives him to blind them; sanity takes the form of Dysart (Richard Burton), a repressed psychiatrist charged with curing Alan of his antisocial passion. In this confrontation between a virile equussexual and an impotent prune...
...Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. This film version of Ken Kesey's fable about a lunatic asylum in the Pacific Northwest lacks all the subtlety and tension that marked the novel in its best moments. But it does offer a brilliant performance by Jack Nicholson perfectly cast as Randle Patrick McMurphy, the hard-living con man who sparks the inmates to rebel against the psychologically castrating Head Nurse only to find himself out-conned...
Comic strip is one of the terms critics have used for the Ken Kesey counter-culture novel that inspired One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest. Big Nurse, Billy Bibbet, Randell McMurphy--zip, zam, zowee-am, swoosh, but with a heavy psycho-social punch packed behind it all. Yet the first shots of Milos Forman's movie--grainy, solemn, self-consciously non-colorful--make clear that this Cuckoo will not foist off a super-super allegory of a nut-fram, but a real Oregon mental hospital, in all its disturbing bleakness and isolation. This interpretive risk pays off, and, except...