One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Retrospective

One of the many things I love about living in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second city, is our wonderful array of thought-provoking public art. On the main square (Náměstí Svobody) there is a controversial and unreadable astronomical clock, which supposedly represents a bullet in reference to the city’s occupation by the Swedish in the 16th Century. It’s very phallic to say the least and there is more childish sniggering to be had one square up in front of the Moravian Gallery. Here you will see a knight sitting astride a horse with very long legs. If you stand under the horse and look up towards its snout, it looks distinctly like a penis and a pair of balls dangling between a man’s legs – every day people queue up to have a good old laugh at it.

Across the road from the tall horse is a statue simply called “Justice” by sculptor Marius Kotrba. Appropriately situated in front of the Supreme Administrative Court, it depicts the stylised figure of a man lifting a large cube. In the summer, a fountain sprays up from the concrete pedestal against the underside of his heavy burden. Supposedly, Kotrba was inspired by Plato’s notion of justice, but movie buffs have other ideas – surely it is a reference to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, right??

It would make sense, since director Milos Forman was Czech and his compatriots are justifiably proud that a film-maker from their country made an enduring Oscar-winning classic. The title of the piece at least tangentially ties in with the themes of the movie, too, as the final escape scene has a certain poetic justice. Strangely, most English-language sources regarding the artwork don’t refer to Forman’s masterpiece at all, but I’m happy the statue exists because it reminds me of the movie every time I walk past it.

I also love that the sculpture is a reminder that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the coming together of source material and a director that came from very different places thousands of miles apart, but had similar things to say about the abuse of power, oppression, non-conformity and liberation.

The story begins in 1959 in Stanford, California. Ken Kesey, who was studying creative writing at Stanford University, agreed to take part in CIA-funded research into the effects of psychedelic drugs. That was his first experience with LSD and it completely shaped his outlook on life. While working as an aide at the same veterans hospital where the experiments took place, Kesey would speak with the patients at night, sometimes under the influence of the mind-altering hallucinogen. The interactions gave him the idea that these people weren’t crazy, just deemed socially unacceptable by the norms of Middle America at the time.

This was the genesis of Kesey’s debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was first published in 1962. From the perspective of Chief Bromden, a long-term patient on a psychiatric ward, it told of the power struggle between Nurse Ratched, the domineering head nurse and Randle Patrick McMurphy, an unruly newcomer faking insanity to avoid a stint on a prison work farm. McMurphy succeeds in becoming a hero to his browbeaten fellow patients, but his rebellious behaviour eventually leads to his doom – he is rendered a vegetable by a lobotomy. Nevertheless, McMurphy has aroused a taste for freedom in the Chief, who liberates his friend’s spirit by smothering him before breaking out of the ward and escaping to a new life.

Kesey’s novel took a psychedelic approach to the story. The Chief has nightmarish visions of Ratched as a hideous monster that represents the all-powerful “Combine” which manipulates and controls individuals from behind a veil of respectable authority. The author wrote the book when the subject of mental health wasn’t widely spoken about, or indeed considered acceptable in American society. 

Even so, it struck a chord in the 1960s as the Civil Rights Movement gained traction and discontent towards traditional institutions of government and church gave rise to the counterculture movement. It’s not hard to see why – as young people began experimenting with drugs, free love and protests, McMurphy fighting against The Combine was directly analogous with kicking back against The Man. 

Three years after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published, Donn Pearce’s Cool Hand Luke also hit the shelves. It also revolved around a rebellious inmate, played by Paul Newman in the 1967 screen version – notably, he often mentions The Man as he refuses to back down to an authoritarian prison warden.

In the meantime, Kesey started out on a journey that would forever associate him with American counterculture in the ‘60s and help LSD become a key element in the hippie movement. He and around 20 other like-minded individuals (including Dean Cassady, the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s main character in On the Road) calling themselves the Merry Pranksters piled onto an old school bus painted with trippy dayglo colours and drove from Oregon to New York for the 1964 World Fair. The trip was immortalised in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

By that stage, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had already become the basis for a Broadway production. Three-time Oscar nominated Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas had already built up a considerable filmography by the time he got wind of Kesey’s novel. He was riding high again after the commercial success of Spartacus, bouncing back after problems with the IRS that nearly ruined him.

Douglas snapped up the rights to Cuckoo’s Nest before it even hit the printing press and decided to mount a Broadway adaptation. Dale Wasserman wrote the stage play, shifting away from Chief Bromden’s point-of-view to a third-person perspective. Perhaps this was a wise move, as it is hard to imagine how Kesey's hallucinatory approach would have worked on stage – or indeed the film version that was later based on Wasserman’s script. Douglas played McMurphy himself opposite Joan Tetzel as Nurse Ratched and the cast also included a young Gene Wilder as Billy Bibbitt.

Despite the success of the novel, the play wasn’t a hit. Sterling Lord, the literary agent who represented both Kesey and Kerouac, recalled how a large section of the audience walked out on opening night in November 1963. Reviews were mixed and the production only ran for five months. Yet Douglas had ambitions to play McMurphy on the big screen and retained the movie rights by exploiting a loophole: Any future feature film would be based on the stage play rather than Kesey’s novel, much to the author’s dismay.

Douglas’s ideas for a film version of Cuckoo’s Nest hit a wall because he had no luck persuading a major studio to put up the money. He did find the perfect director, however.

During a 1966 goodwill tour of six countries behind the Iron Curtain, Douglas arrived in Prague. While he was in town, he visited Barrandov Studios and saw a few movies directed by the bright young stars of the Czech New Wave. One of the films was by Milos Forman. 

They got chatting at the afterparty and Douglas told Forman he had the rights to a great book if he fancied directing it. As you might expect, Forman was thrilled by the idea and agreed. Douglas promised to send him a copy when he got back to the States, but the package never arrived. Forman said much later in a 2006 interview:

"For me, it was just another Hollywood bullshit artist, right? Spins a young Czech filmmaker's head around and then the moment he leaves the room, forgets... “

Forman and his peers had experienced the kind of oppression depicted by Kesey’s novel first-hand. Czechoslovakia fell under the Soviet sphere of influence in 1948 after the brief few years of freedom that  followed the country’s liberation by Russian troops from the Nazis at the end of World War II. By the 1960s, the leadership of Communist premier Antonin Novotny was failing and the natives were getting restless. Young people who had grown up during under Communist rule were becoming increasingly fed up with restrictions on their personal freedom and started rebelling against the regime, mirroring similar unrest in the United States and other countries around the world.

The Czechoslovak film industry at the time, centred around the powerhouse of Barrandov in Prague, was in a unique space. The studio was funded by the government and politicians didn’t really care about box office receipts, which gave up-and-coming directors the freedom to make whatever movies they wanted. This gave rise to a golden period of filmmaking known as the Czech New Wave, which was a fertile period of creativity for the likes of Evald Schorm, Jaromil Jireš, Jan Němec, Ivan Passer and Věra Chytilová.

This creative freedom was regularly and abruptly curtailed when censors saw what the films actually contained. Many masterpieces of the period fell foul of the regime, with some directors blackballed and their films “banned forever,” only to receive the acclaim they deserved after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. 

Milos Forman’s first two films, Black Peter and Loves of a Blonde, did little to incur the wrath of the censors. That changed with the release of The Firemen’s Ball in 1967, which not only upset real firefighters across the country but also received a ban. It would be Forman’s last Czech film. Disillusioned and angered by Warsaw Pact troops rolling into the country to crush the Prague Spring uprising in 1968, the director packed his bags and headed to the United States.

As it turned out, Kirk Douglas had kept his promise and sent Forman a copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but Forman never received it. The Czechoslovak HSTD (General Administration of Press Supervision) was tasked with monitoring all published materials sent from foreign capitalist countries, particularly the United States. The goal of the postal project was to worm out anything that might be deemed to undermine the Socialist ideals of the regime and their puppet masters in Moscow. Something as anti-authoritarian as Kesey’s novel would have almost certainly fallen into this category, as Forman later said:

"To me [One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest] was not just literature but real life, the life I lived in Czechoslovakia from my birth in 1932 until 1968. The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched, telling me what I could and could not do; what I was or was not allowed to say; where I was and was not allowed to go; even who I was and was not."

Forman’s first American film, Taking Off (1971), was well-received by critics and shared the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes with Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, but otherwise didn’t exactly pull up any trees. Then a strange coincidence occurred – Forman received a copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest from Michael Douglas, who had been handed the film rights by his dad after years of fruitlessly trying to get the project off the ground. Michael was very politically active during his time at university in Santa Barbara and was drawn to the novel’s non-conformist stance, seeing it as a great story of one man versus the system.

Douglas Junior had no knowledge of Kirk’s previous promise to Forman, but reached out to the director after seeing The Firemen’s Ball and deciding he had exactly the qualities he wanted for a big screen adaptation. Forman later recalled running into Kirk:

"When I met Kirk, he said, 'you son of a gun, I sent you [the] book and you didn't even have the courtesy to tell me to shove it.' And I said, 'you know, I thought the same about you.' Well, what happened, he really did send the book, but the censors at the customs confiscated the book and didn't tell him and didn't tell me."

Douglas partnered up with Saul Zaentz to co-produce the film. Zaentz tried hiring Kesey to write the screenplay, but the author was strongly against switching perspectives away from Chief Bromden. Any potential collaboration with the author ended with a bitter lawsuit and Kesey vowed never to watch the movie, even when it premiered in his hometown. He told David Letterman in 1983: “That’s like calling and saying, ‘Hey, the Hell’s Angels are raping your daughter in the parking lot, would you like to watch?’” He stuck to his word and passed away in 2001 without ever seeing Forman’s film.

When it came down to casting, the key role was naturally McMurphy. Kesey had written him as a stocky, brawling red-headed Irish-American in the book, which certainly didn’t match the description of Kirk Douglas, who still wanted to play the character. Now in his fifties, both his son and Zaentz considered him too old for the role.

Other actors considered included James Caan, Marlon Brando, Burt Reynolds (Forman’s ideal choice) and Kesey’s pick, Gene Hackman. All four turned down the part before the masterstroke – Hal Ashby, who was in the early running to direct the film before Forman got the job, suggested Jack Nicholson.

The actor had himself tried to buy the rights to Cuckoo’s Nest in the early ‘60s but lost out to Kirk Douglas. As hard as it may seem to believe now, the producers originally had trouble picturing Nicholson in the role, despite the fact he had already established himself as counterculture-adjacent by writing The Trip (1967) and Head (1968) and receiving an Oscar nomination for his turn in Easy Rider (1969).

Production was put on hold for six months due to Nicholson’s schedule, which gave Forman and the producers the time to assemble an outstanding cast. Danny DeVito, who played Martini, was the first onboard and several high-profile actors were in the frame to portray Nurse Ratched including Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Angela Lansbury and Anne Bancroft before Lily Tomlin got the part. Forman wanted Louise Fletcher to play the Big Nurse after seeing her in Thieves Like Us, however, and she eventually swapped roles in Nashville with Tomlin.

As for the supporting ensemble, Will Sampson was working as a used car salesman before he landed the role of Chief Bromden and the rest of the cast was rounded out by quality character actors like Brad Dourif (Billy), Christopher Lloyd (Taber), William Redfield (Harding), Sydney Lassick (Cheswick) and Scatman Crothers (Turkle, the long-suffering night warden).

Filming began in January 1975, shot on location in Oregon State Hospital, a working facility with real psychiatric patients in the background as extras in some scenes. Dean Brooks, the hospital’s director, ended up playing his equivalent in the movie, Dr. Spivey. The authentic backdrop and Forman’s observational style gives the film almost a documentary feel. Forman shot some scenes without the actors’ knowledge and he lets long passages of dialogue play out with a loose and improvisatory rhythm. He never misses a beat and the growing animosity between McMurphy and Ratched plays out in a series of terse exchanges and challenging glances before it eventually explodes.

Fletcher’s cold stare and tight-lipped smiles are a great contrast to Nicholson’s larger-than-life presence, but the latter also deserves credit for how he brings the best out of the supporting actors. It is a delight watching the others play off him, especially how the Chief grows to trust McMurphy and the confidence that Billy gains from the rebel.

The story is masterfully told, culminating in one of the all-time great endings that is simultaneously tragic and triumphant. I always get chills when Jack Nitzsche’s off-kilter score swells as the Chief manages to rip the hydrotherapy fountains off its moorings, hurl it through the window, and disappear into the dawn-light.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a major critical and commercial success. It grossed over $163 million at the box office from just a $4.4 million budget and won the “Big Five” Oscars at the 48th Academy Awards – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay. Along with It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs, it remains one of only three films to manage such an accomplishment.

A few months back, I decided it was time to watch Cuckoo’s Nest with my children. Some might say they’re a bit young for it, aged 11 and 8, but I thought they would enjoy it and respond to the rebellious message. They did on both counts and now whenever we walk past the Justice statue not far from where we live in central Brno, they always point and say: “That’s from that movie!” Right you are, kids and never let the Combine grind you down.

So there you have it, our retrospective of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What are your thoughts on the movie? Let us know!