The New York Times: Best Pictures

People like Randle Patrick McMurphy are foregone conclusions. You gather together at random any 12 men, and one of them will eventually surface as the group's Randle Patrick McMurphy, the organizer, the spokesman, the leading hell-raiser and free spirit, the man who accepts nothing at face value and who likes to shake up the system, sometimes just because it's there. The quality of Randle Patrick McMurphy depends entirely on the intensity of his opposition.

Before the start of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Milos Forman's film version of Ken Kesey's 1962 novel, Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) was strictly small potatoes, his life distinguished by nothing except carelessness.

One assumes him to have been a quick-witted but none-too-bright fellow whose vanity, drinking, whoring and short temper have earned him a minor police record consisting mostly of assault-and-battery complaints, concluding with a conviction for statutory rape. The girl, who said she was 19, was only 15.

When we first meet Randle, he has served two months of his six-month sentence and has managed to get himself transferred to the state mental hospital for psychiatric observation, figuring that life in the loony bin would be easier than on the prison farm. It's the beginning of the end for Randle, but the ferocity of the system imposes on him a kind of crazy grandeur.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," which opened yesterday at the Sutton and Paramount Theaters, is a comedy that can't quite support its tragic conclusion, which is too schematic to be honestly moving, but it is acted with such a sense of life that one responds to its demonstration of humanity if not to its programmed metaphors.

Once in the bin, Randle becomes the self-proclaimed champion of the rights of the other ward patients, his adversary being Nurse Ratched, a severe, once-pretty woman of uncertain age who can be sympathetic and understanding only in ways that reinforce her authority. Nurse Ratched represents the System, that all Randles must buck.

As played by Louise Fletcher and defined in the screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, the film's Nurse Ratched is a much more interesting, more ambiguous character than in Mr. Kesey's novel, though what we take to be her fleeting impulses of genuine concern only make the film's ending that much more unbelievable.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is at its best when Mr. Forman is exercising his talents as a director of exuberant comedy that challenges preconceived notions of good taste. It's not too far from the mark to describe Randle as a sort of Mister Roberts who finds himself serving aboard the U. S. S. Madhouse. It's to Mr. Forman's credit that the other patients in the ward, though suffering from all sorts of psychoses, are never patronized as freaks but are immediately identifiable as variations on ourselves, should we ever go over the edge of what's called sanity.

Mr. Nicholson slips into the role of Randle with such easy grace that it's difficult to remember him in any other film. It's a flamboyant performance but not so overbearing that it obscures his fellow actors, all of whom are very good and a few of whom are close to brilliant, including William Redfield (as an egghead patient who talks grave nonsense), Will Sampson (as a deaf-mute Indian) and Brad Dourif (as a young man with a fatal mother complex).

There are some unsettling things about "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." I suspect that we are meant to make connections between Randle's confrontation with the oppressive Nurse Ratched and the political turmoil in this country in the 1960's. The connection doesn't work. All it does is conveniently distract us from questioning the accuracy of the film's picture of life in a mental institution where shock treatments are dispensed like aspirins and lobotomies are prescribed as if the mind's frontal lobes were troublesome wisdom teeth.

Even granting the artist his license, America is much too big and various to be satisfactorily reduced to the dimensions of one mental ward in a movie like this.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST

With Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William Redfield, Will Sampson, Brad Dourif and Marya Small.

Directed by Milos Forman; screenplay by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, based on the novel by Ken Kesey; produced by Saul Zaentz and Michael Douglas; director of photography, Haskell Wexler; additional photography by Bill Butler and William Fraker; music, Jack Nitzsche; supervising film editor, Richard Chew; editors, Lynzee Klingman and Sheldon Kahn; a Fantasy Films production, distributed by United Artists. At the Sutton Theater.

Scene from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," starring Jack Nicholson. (United Artists)


•	'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest': A Real Mental Ward Becomes A Movie 'Cuckoo's Nest'
•	'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest': Louise Fletcher: The Nurse Who Rules the 'Cuckoo's Nest'


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