A movie winning the big five Academy Awards – best picture along with honoring the lead actor and actress, writing and directing – happens so rarely that there’s not much use in examining the three movies that have pulled it off for common ground. But among It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Silence of the Lambs, it may be Cuckoo’s Nest, released 50 years ago on Wednesday, that feels like the unlikeliest across-the-board triumph. It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs both belong to rarely awarded genres (romantic comedy and horror, respectively), which makes their big wins unusual but also clearcut: here is an example of the best this type of movie has to offer. Cuckoo’s Nest, meanwhile, is potentially much thornier. It’s a comedy-drama made at least in part as allegory – an anti-conformity story of fomenting 1960s social rebellion, disguised as a movie about lovable patients at a mental health facility.
The Ken Kesey novel that the movie is based on was published in 1962, chronicling some of what Kesey saw as a hospital orderly and anticipating some of the coming pushback against postwar American conformity. The major change in Miloš Forman’s film is to shift the narrative away from Chief (Will Sampson), a towering Native American who presents himself as deaf and mute. Chief narrates the book, while the movie hews closer to the perspective of RP McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), who enters the facility having faked mental illness in the hopes that he can avoid serving out a prison work-camp sentence. Though the doctors don’t seem entirely convinced by his ruse, his behavior is apparently erratic enough for him to stay at least a little while. His attempts to bring more individualism and fun to his cohabitants runs afoul of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who exercises tight control over the ward.
The free-spirited rogue vexing a stern authority figure by inciting partying is a conceit that borders on zaniness; only a few years later, two of the actors who play patients at the facility, Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd, would be co-starring on the cast-of-eccentrics sitcom Taxi, with Lloyd even playing an amusingly burnt-out weirdo. (A great show, to be clear, but not a sobering account of mental illness.) Nicholson, however, gives such a layered performance that McMurphy transcends any easy romanticization. He’s at once as caricatured as any future “Jack” parts – look at the way McMurphy’s trademark skullcap, when removed, accentuates the arches of Nicholson’s instantly recognizable receding hairline – and subtly haunted.
The moment often cited, and with good cause, comes close to the end of the picture, in the aftermath of a raucous party in-ward McMurphy has haphazardly arranged for his new friends. (It’s the kind of messy blowout that would cause many a crusty old dean to admonish a fun-loving frat for this time going too far.) McMurphy and Chief plan to escape the facility at the end of the night; they’re two of the few patients who have been committed, rather than residing there voluntarily. McMurphy sits near the window where he’ll supposedly make his escape, staring into space, and Forman holds on the closeup of Nicholson as he appears to contemplate the consequences of his actions, or maybe what he might actually do next, given his arrest record and limited resources. The stare isn’t exactly vacant – though it is echoed by his vegetative look at the end of the film, after he’s been punished for his rebellion by a lobotomy – but you can sense the lostness beneath his Nicholsonian bravado.
Fletcher did not go on to a Nicholson-sized career, but her work as Nurse Ratched is nearly as indelible. In terms of screen time, she could be considered a supporting player; she’s less immediately visible for much of the movie than the ensemble of patients surrounding McMurphy. Fletcher doesn’t showboat, either. For the vast majority of her scenes, she’s quietly officious, rarely raising her voice – but never giving in, either, quelling dissent or changes in routine with a stubbornness she smoothly passes as care. Those with memories of McMurphy’s rebellious nature might be surprised to find how many scenes involve him ultimately deferring to Ratched, despite what he refers to as “that henhouse shit”. Her key moment comes when she admonishes young, timid Billy (Brad Dourif) for consorting with a prostitute. She doesn’t focus on recklessness or respect for women or even breaking the facility’s rules. Instead, she asks: “Aren’t you ashamed?”
The idea of shaming people into conformity still resonates, not least because it’s issued here by an authority figure who (as is often the case) seems to refuse any herself. Though some of the treatment methods depicted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest would fall out of favor in the decades after, the movie derives a certain sense of timelessness from its milieu, simply because the isolation and regimented nature of the hospital doesn’t feel particularly confined to the 1960s, when the story is set, or the 1970s, when it was made. (OK, maybe the notion of McMurphy’s illicit day out involving taking the boys fishing feels quaint today.)
Louise Fletcher and Jack Nicholson. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Fifty years later, the film’s influence may be most visible through its zanier side – which in a weird way turns out to be its more menacing side, too. It doesn’t feel entirely coincidental that the campus comedy Animal House, released a few years later, is set right around the same time as Cuckoo’s Nest, finding similarly male-centric liberation in parties and tacit self-destruction, only without the sadder dimensions of the earlier film. And despite that sadness, Cuckoo’s Nest does push a very American form of rugged-to-a-fault individualism, even conflating that rebellious nature with a Native character. In 2025, there’s almost something a little bit Maha-coded about the film’s treatment of mental health, where conditions like Billy’s stammer can be conquered with a little thematically neat (and convenient) gumption, while Chief’s muteness and deafness are just stuff he’s decided to fake, and medication is just another conformist form of control.
Of course, those undertones are more to do with shifts in the nature of American rebellion over the past half-century. Still, it’s instructive to look at the unusually staggering lineup of competition Cuckoo’s Nest faced at the Oscars. Setting aside the Europe-set Barry Lyndon, the other best picture nominees for 1975 tell specific and fascinating stories about the US: the can-do spirit of the central trio in Jaws, pitted against all-American, Independence Day-themed capitalism; the hapless criminals of Dog Day Afternoon, feeling abandoned by society as they incite a media circus; and the roiling, sometimes ridiculous political climate depicted in Nashville. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, ending (as the novel did) with Chief smothering a lobotomized McMurphy and making the leap to his own majestic escape, seems at least as sad as any of those films. Yet it’s understandably received as something more triumphant, however mitigated that spirit might be. “I tried, didn’t I? Goddammit, at least I did that,” McMurphy says about his own attempt to lift a water tank and smash a window, as Chief eventually does. It’s not the most subtle or complex message among those other 1975 classics. But it might be the easiest for audiences to latch on to. Who can’t relate to losing a battle and telling ourselves that we eked out a victory?
