Tremendously well done film, with Jack Nicholson giving an incredible performance, and Louise Fletcher showing what a bitch truely is. It's also interesting to spot the future stars in the nuthouse, such as Christopher Lloyd and Danny Devito. A very satisfying film in every way! Michael Douglas could have had a career if he stuck to producing.

A

One of the best of all time, the last thirty minutes are very powerful, just as in another Nicholson movie, A Few Good Men.

A++

Oh and number 24 on the all time greatest list, Jack's second best movie to Chinatown (number 17)

bumps!!

One of the greatest movies of all time. Jack Nicholson is at his best here. A+

bumps

stop it

just watched it again today, then I watched The Untouchables.

Now I don't know whether to give my brother the DVD for Christmas or not...I wasn't expecting it to be so good. :o


Here's hoping he doesn't have a dvd player and makes the choice easy for me. :up:

aside from the shining, this is nicholson's best work. this film is terriffic, with great performances all around.

It's one of my favorite films as well. It can be funny (The boat scene), but it is mostly very powerful. The last 20 minutes of the film are pretty much heartbreaking.

A+

Great film! Memorable characters, and I thought Jack Nicholson and Louise Flecther gave wonderful performances. The end was really sad but at the same time very uplifting. I loved this film.

A

I found it very well-acted, and the characters compelling and sympathetic, but I felt the story was a bit thin and made the ending not as powerful as it could have been. While I think Jack Nicholson's performance is simply magnetic, possibly because of his energetic character, I found Louise Fletcher's role to be too abbreviated, and, as a result, not as villainous as I was expecting. The performance was great, but I found it to be much more of a supporting role than a lead one. The story just seems to be a series of events strung loosely along, and didn't really lead up to the powerful ending well. The ending was still emotional, though, mostly because of the great performances. The highlight of the film, for me, is the realistic relationships between all the characters - I found no weak links in the expansive cast, and the characters all felt real. I found the direction really noticeable at times, like when McMurphy's reactions are focused on during the argument between Harding and Taber, but wholly unremarkable at others. It's very funny, too, though I feel almost ashamed for laughing at the mental handicaps, and I'm not sure what the filmmakers' intention was. Overall, I found it to be slightly overrated, if only because I thought the story was slightly lacking, but certainly deserving of the accolades for its cast - especially Jack.

This is definitely up there on my best of all time list. Jack is fantastic in this, and Louise is right there behind him in excellency. It deserved every award it received and probably a few more it didn't get. The acting is really the film's strongest part and raises it up a notch or two.

A

A-


It gets even better on repeat viewings, IMO. My only real complaint was as trixster has said that ouise Fletcher's character seemed somewhat underworked, I never really bought her as the hugely mean and nasty person she was supposed to be. The cast is great and Nicholson delivers one of the three best performances in his career (of those I have seen). The ending is very powerful.

Pretty good even though the insane asylum genre isn't one of my favorites. Jack's signature role.....what else can you say?

My grade: A-.

If she would be more wicked, more nasty then her charatcer would have not been so believable. She is one of those people in life that are the real kind of evil. She is a bitch, she has control over the people, and doesn't think highly of the ward members. She enjoys control and thinks confomrity and degradtion is the remidy for the patients. She is just so subtle, so eerie, so real. She isn't some nasty villain that twirls their mustache while holding the bomb, not the loud angry villain, not the Hitler who commands people at their will, she is the real villain in life. The one teacher at school who cencors your hard work. The one that tells you can't do that. The one parent who you can never please. She is that, a true villain, and she is so subtle about it that unless you under stand the world of anti-conformity, anti-conservative, you would not understand why she is so subtle. Read the book and you will hate her even more.

One of my all time favorites and its a sorta whose who of Batman characters. I actually think the movie is better than the book and Ken Kesey is one of my favorite authors. My only complaint, and it is fairly irrelevant, is that Brad Dourif has a horrible haircut. I like the slow build-down of McMurphy and the slow build-up of Chief Bromden.

Nurse Ratched is played perfectly and was calm until the final scenes, just as she should be. Her cruelty manifests itself in her calm and emotionless responses. She is nearly an automaton until McMurphy finally raises her ire. In that scene in the book I think McMurhpy exposed her breasts, but that portion always sorta stuck out and I liked how the movie played the scene a bit more.

A+ and my favorite Jack Nicholson performance.

The more I watched this film, it has become my favorite film of all time surpassing Lawrence of Arabia

If a film still impresses and you have nothing but "spectacular" and "unanimous" praise for it, that means it is really really good Magnus.

why 's this movie so famous i dont understand jack is one of my fav actors !!!

but this movie is over-rated just like star wars that is all !!!

Saw it on DVD yesterday.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a social commentary about the constructed identity handed down by our society and the reinforcement and institutionalization of which. The story is set in a hospital housing the "allegedly mentally ill" patients (both voluntary and committed) for psychiatric treatment. In this spatially confined environment, the inhabitants undergo therapeutic group meeting designed to reduce separation. The institution's carefully controlled and watched daily routine overseen by nurse Ratched (brilliantly played by Louise Fletcher) is disturbed when rebel-typed convict McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson) is admitted for mental evaluation.

In real life, mental illnesses are defined and termed and labeled on people and treated by an elitist group of specialists called psychiatrists. They are supposedly and generally agreed upon by the society. The film seems to repeal that notion of authority (to assign labels to people deemed "mentally (or socially?) unfit"). At the same time, it challenges the social identity and stigma forced upon "the mentally ill" by the society. That the "certified" mentally ill are locked up to be conditioned to re-adapt to the "normal" environment does nothing but reinforces the stigma created by the mainstream society.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) reminds me of several other films. Its theme replicates Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). Billy's suicide scene brings back my memory of Dead Poets Society (1989). McMurphy's and Chief's escape scene reminds me of The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

Overall, it was an enjoyable film. But I should have enjoyed it more if I had seen it earlier because I would have appreciated its originality more without having seen other newer films with a similar theme. I believe the story idea was then considered a subject that's rarely touched on.

P.S. my complaint about the ending:

Spoiler: show

Murphy's suffocation to death by Chief is too dramatic and one is not adequately clued to the circumstances under which it occurs.

Chief's escape scene, and Murphy's rallying roommates for support of World Series and roommates's sometimes-too-easy submission to him all are too satisfying to be realistic.

Grade: B

You know, all of the elements of this film are fantastic, but I do have one major qualm with it: I felt Nurse Rached's at the end, although brilliantly played by Louise Fletcher, went over the line with regards to her character. Before that, it felt like she was genuinely interested in the patients' health, but had a rather rigid philosophy as to how to achieve that. At the end, she just becomes pure evil. The film insists on making points bigger than it should. Still, very entertaining but disturbing picture of human collapse (and growth) within a mental institution. A classic, but not one of my all time favorites.

A