Age has not withered One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Milos Forman’s barnstorming account of the men who were once labelled lunatics inside what was once called an asylum. Shifting social attitudes can’t blunt its barbed comedy or draw the sting of a drama that pits timid patients against the icy, rigid Nurse Ratched. Time, if anything, has only sharpened the film’s edges, so that it feels more lawless and hazardous than it did in the past. Lovingly dusted down and reissued for posterity, it swaggers into cinemas this week like Randle Patrick McMurphy into the Oregon state mental hospital.
Forman’s film is now 50, a solid, respectable age, except that Cuckoo’s Nest has never really been respectable, let alone staid and settled, and more resembles a disreputable uncle who struck gold and joined the country club. It was an orphan, an outlier, rejected by every major studio until United Artists picked it up; the unruly underdog that went on to clean up at the Oscars and become the second-highest-grossing picture of the year behind Jaws (1975).
