There is a curiously extended closeup of Jack Nicholson about four-fifths of the way through "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." We notice it because it lingers. The USMNT used an insane strike from Michael Bradley and some nerve-wracking and occasionally infuriating bus-parking to hold on for a 1-1 draw and snatch a point in.

There is a curiously extended closeup of Jack Nicholson about four-fifths of the way through "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." We notice it because it lingers. The USMNT used an insane strike from Michael Bradley and some nerve-wracking and occasionally infuriating bus-parking to hold on for a 1-1 draw and snatch a point in.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Movie Review (1. There is a curiously extended closeup of Jack Nicholson about four- fifths of the way through . It shows his character, R. P. Mc. Murphy, lost in thought. It comes at the balancing point between the pranks and laughter of the earlier parts of the film, and the final descent into tragedy. What is he thinking?

Is he planning new defiance, or realizing that all is lost? The mystery of what Mc. Murphy is thinking is the mystery of the movie. It all leads up to a late scene where he is found asleep on the floor next to an open window. By deciding not to escape, he has more or less chosen his own fate.

Has his life force run out at last? After his uprising against the mental institution, after the inmates' rebellion that he led, after his life- affirming transformations of Billy and the Chief, after his comeback from an initial dose of shock therapy, has he come at last to the end of his hope? Advertisement. It was the first film since .

It could for that matter have won, too, for cinematography (Haskell Wexler) and editing (Richard Chew). I was present at its world premiere, at the 1. Chicago Film Festival, in the 3,0.

Uptown Theatre, and have never heard a more tumultuous reception for a film (no, not even during . The Extra- Terrestrial. After the screening, the young first- time co- producer, Michael Douglas, wandered the lobby in a daze. But what did the audience, which loved the film so intensely, think it was about? The film is remembered as a comedy about the inmate revolt led by Mc.

Park Vista Cheerleading Racism Vs Prejudice

Murphy, and the fishing trip, the all- night orgy, and his defiance of Nurse Ratched (Fletcher)- -but in fact it is about Mc. Murphy's defeat. One can call it a moral victory, and rejoice in the Chief's escape, but that is small consolation for Mc. Murphy. The film is based on Ken Kesey's 1.

Faces of Suicide - remembering those that left before their time. 10ConRoolidal New Haven Register. Your local source for breaking news, sports, business, classifieds, and entertainment in New Haven.

Pauline Kael observed . We discover that the Chief is not really mute, Billy need not stutter, and others need not be paralyzed by shyness or fear. They will be cured not by Nurse Ratched's pills, Muzak and discussion groups, but by Mc. Murphy liberating them to be guys- -to watch the World Series on TV, go fishing, play pick- up basketball, get drunk, get laid. The message for these wretched inmates is: Be like Jack.

The movie's simplistic approach to mental illness is not really a fault of the movie, because it has no interest in being about insanity. It is about a free spirit in a closed system. Nurse Ratched, who is so inflexible, so unseeing, so blandly sure she is right, represents Momism at its radical extreme, and Mc. Murphy is the Huck Finn who wants to break loose from her version of civilization.

The movie is among other things profoundly fearful of women; the only two portrayed positively are Mc. Murphy's hooker friends Candy and Rose. I mean this as an observation, not a criticism.

Advertisement. Mc. Murphy's past is hinted at early in the film; he was sentenced to a prison farm for criminal assault against an underage girl (. The movie sees the patients in the same way. The photography and editing supply reaction shots that almost always have the same message: A given patient's fixed expression is misinterpreted because of the new context supplied by Mc. Murphy. Consider the scene where Mc.

Murphy has stolen the boat and has his friends on board. When he is questioned, he introduces them all as doctors, and there are quick cuts to closeups of each one looking doctorly on cue.

This has nothing to do with mental illness but everything to do with comedy. Nicholson's performance is one of the high points in a long career of enviable rebels. Jack is a beloved American presence, a superb actor who even more crucially is a superb male sprite. The joke lurking beneath the surface of most of his performances is that he gets away with things because he knows how to, wants to, and has the nerve to. His characters stand for freedom, anarchy, self- gratification and bucking the system, and often they also stand for generous friendship and a kind of careworn nobility. The key to the success of his work in . This may be because her Nurse Ratched is so thoroughly contemptible, and because she embodies so completely the qualities we all (men and women) have been taught to fear in a certain kind of female authority figure- -a woman who has subsumed sexuality and humanity into duty and righteousness.

Dressed in her quasi- military nurse's costume, with its little hat and its Civil War- style cape, she is dominatrix and warden, followed everywhere by the small, unspeaking nurse who is her acolyte. Advertisement. Because we respond so strongly to her we hardly see Fletcher's performance. But watch her preternatural calm, her impassive . At the end, when Mc. Murphy's final fate is decided upon, note how the male administrator tentatively suggests he be sent back to the prison farm, but Ratched firmly contradicts him: ? I can see it through either filter. It remains enduringly popular as an anti- establishment parable, but achieves its success by deliberately choosing to use the mental patients as comic caricatures.

This decision leads to the fishing trip, which is at once the most popular, and the most false, scene in the movie. It is Mc. Murphy's great joyous thumb in the eye to Ratched and her kind, but the energy of the sequence cannot disguise the unease and confusion of men who, in many cases, have no idea where they are, or why. Consider by comparison the quiet, late- night speech by the Chief (Will Sampson), who speaks of his father. This is a window into a real character with real problems, who has chosen to be considered deaf and mute rather than talk about them. Mc. Murphy's treatment works for him, and leads up to the sad perfection of the very final scenes- -during which, if he could see them, Mc.

Murphy would be proud of his star pupil. Milos Forman, born in Czechoslovakia in 1. American manners and mores. A leader of the Czech New Wave, his early films like . Look at the quintessentially American topics of his films: The runaway young people and conventional parents of . Larry Flynt. He sees his adopted land in terms of its best nonconformist and outsider traditions, at a time when conformity is the new creed. His Mc. Murphy succeeds and prevails as a character, despite the imperfections of the film, because he represents that cleansing spirit that comes along now and again to renew us.