Word: warded
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bland norm should be locked up and lobotomized--and reverses it, adding no subtleties in the process. The result is a prescription that "order" is wrong and that "sub-normal twits and gibbering hunks of animality" should inherit the earth. Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) arrives at a relatively quiet ward in a mental institution, where three-quarters of the patients are "voluntaries," and he proceeds to wreak havoc. The only crazy thing about him, he claims, is that all he wants to do is "fight and fuck." The state work farm has referred him to the doctors, who think...
...inability to see how to do it. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) is, in my view, the real hero; in the book she was called simply "Big Nurse." In the film she is well-meaning, prim, and, on the whole, sympathetic--especially when McMurphy begins to take control of the ward. The only thing we are shown that might lead us to dislike her is her unscrupulous use of the meaning of a parliamentary majority in a vote taken in the ward--but one which is technically correct...
...poker. McMurphy's real problem is that he is a child who never grew up, who believes in the therapeutic power of good team sports. Perhaps this will strike a responsive chord in most audiences. McMurphy's other chief preoccupation is sex. There is a young boy in the ward named Billy Bibbit who has never had sex and has, apparently, been driven to psychosis and suicide attempts by a repressive mother. His case is the one cure that McMurphy attempts with "alternate psychology." He brings a whore into the ward and pushes Billy into a room with...
WHAT HAPPENS next is the key to the film. When Nurse Ratched arrives the morning after McMurphy's orgy she is justifiably upset at the shambles the ward is in--the medicine has been spilled, the patients are filthy, etc. She vindictively turns on Billy and reduces him to a state of utter pathos by threatening to tell his mother about his night with the woman. Left alone for a minute, the boy commits suicide. McMurphy thereupon throws himself on Ratched and comes very close to strangling her. A guard knocks him out just in time, though...
...keep patients under her domination and not to help them. Or are we supposed to take her preference for order over chaos, for cleanliness over filth, as the real prelude to such a cruel act? Her chief role has been to protect the weaker members of the ward from McMurphy--she rations their cigarettes after she finds out that McMurphy has been bilking them away at poker. That the Indian smothers McMurphy is supposed to mean that life as a vegetable is not preferable to death--perhaps this is true. It is appropriate that the film closes with...