[In the following excerpt, Coleman explores the themes of sanity versus insanity and love versus hate in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.]

Ken Kesey's novel [One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest] caused quite a stir when it first appeared in 1962, and rightly. I had heard vaguely of Kesey as a major prophet of the youth revolution, read some disjointed scraps of his somewhere or other, and knew that his book about life in a mental institution was supposed to have been written under the influence of LSD: the auguries were unpromising. But the other day I laid bold hands on the thing and found myself held enough to read it in a single session. Since events are transmitted through the now befogged, now pellucid consciousness of a huge half-Indian, Chief Bromden, it may be that some acid went into the creative melting-pot; but not much, I would hazard. Generally, Kesey has complete control of his material, his characters stick up from the page like so many wounded thumbs, the coherence and humour are in a different league from the ramblings of a Kerouac. There is, however, an underlying theme: one enlivening day a bull of a man called R. P. McMurphy is brought in from a penal work farm, feigning insanity, and in no time at all he has the walking patients (the Acutes, as opposed to the Chronics, the Wheelers, the Vegetables, and the people ‘upstairs’) striving to assert themselves against what he sees as the ball-breaking domination of Nurse Ratched, a great-bosomed martinet of some cunning and sadistic intent. Randle McMurphy, an inveterate gambler, sets out to defuse her in a week, and for a while his particular blunt therapy does wonders on his fellow-inmates.

This is one of the larger sentimental (or, at least, highly questionable) proposals that Kesey commits himself to: and we shall soon be returning to it. In the tragic event, the system proves too strong even for McMurphy and it is the disinherited half-breed, long thought to be deaf and dumb, who makes the final escape—on our behalf, we are invited to feel. Society is sick, etc.

Kirk Douglas bought the film rights 13 years ago and it is his son, Michael, who now figures as co-producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, together with Saul Zaentz: more interestingly, it is the marvelous Czech, Milos Forman (Peter and Pavla, A Blonde in Love, The Firemen's Ball and then his first American venture, Taking Off), who directs. The result is an in-and-out movie, much more in than out and at its best as good as anything Forman has done, with a radical but necessary structural alteration made to the original story: Kesey prepared an early draft screenplay, which was rejected (he and Forman never met), and the final version is the work of two writers, one coming in after the other—Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman—with, it would not be surprising, the director, who trained at the Czech Film School as a writer, coming up with the further odd line himself.

He likes a degree of improvisation, so much so—in fact—that he and his cameraman Haskell Wexler reluctantly parted company during the shooting: Bill Butler took over and, for a fishing-trip sequence filmed last, William Fraker. There were other snags: finding a location (a vacant ward in the Oregon State Hospital solved that, where the whole unit camped out), fending off the natural anxiety of the authorities, persuading an actress to play the ungrateful butch and bullying role of Kesey's ‘Big Nurse’ (both Anne Bancroft and Angela Lansbury are said to have turned it down). But the biggest problem of all was inevitably what to do about that first-person narrator. The answer has been to take the bull McMurphy by the horns and shove him firmly centre stage, relegating the Indian to the sidelines till near the end. And since McMurphy was to be the big fellow coming in from outside, Forman for once wanted a star and got him: Jack Nicholson, who may be about half the size of Kesey's Irishman but makes up for it in an astute, brash, persuasive and ultimately panicky impersonation of intentional ambiguity.

The rest of a superb cast was mainly recruited from the relatively unknown and the word goes that a few authentic patients and staff are occasionally on view. Forman ‘lived’ the film after his fashion and certainly specific details of his cuckoos' behaviour stamp themselves on the mind: the spruce, white-haired old dancer, the man forever self-crucified against a wall, the wheelchair general who thwacks a punchball with his walking stick, stumpy little Martini who messes up all their table games, peeking at cards, swallowing the die, hysterically flaring and subsiding Cheswick (Sydney Lassick) who worships McMurphy, stammering young Billy (Brad Dourif) with his fear of mummy, supercilious Harding (William Redfield), gelded by a flighty wife, and the great, slab-faced Bromden (Will Sampson), whose elated walk and jaunty jogtrot around a basketball court after a couple of successes against the male nurses brought a round of applause, for heaven's sake, at the packed, papered press show. No question at all about whose side the audience was on, which is where I must quote Mr Forman:

I can only define ‘mental illness’ as an incapacity to adjust within normal measure to ever-changing, unspoken rules. If you are incapable of making these constant changes, you are called by your environment crazy. Which of course indicates that mental illness is a social disease …

The trouble is—and all hail to R. D. Laing—it is surely more complicated than that. And yet Forman appears to believe it that simple, enough at any rate to promote a mildly modified form of Kesey's baddies (the staff) versus the goodies (the patients): even allowing for the fact that a majority of the so-called Acutes are voluntary inmates—and McMurphy's traumatic shock comes in a superbly underplayed scene in a swimming pool when he realises he is one of the few to have actually been committed and therefore liable to stay until Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) says otherwise—they would hardly be, as they are here almost to a man, little more than eccentrics, usually harmless and hence available for genial comedy. ‘You all crazy?’ asks pretty Candy, a gum-chewing whore imported for an illicit fishing-trip organised by McMurphy, and old Cheswick nods contentedly back.

When matters grow really ugly at the close, with McMurphy smuggled back into the ward at night, lobotomised, and Bromden compassionately putting him out of his nullity before crashing free, it is nearly too sudden. And yet something equivocal, fighting to disturb the excellently entertaining surface of the film (that fishing-trip, a wild drinking party that finishes with Billy getting laid and killing himself under verbal duress next morning), has been prepared for. A strange smile passes between Miss Fletcher's Nurse (is she all bad?) and her tormentor-in-chief at one moment: and the smooth doctor in charge turns to her later, underlining this near-complicity—‘Funny thing is the person he's closest to is the one he dislikes most. That's you, Mildred.’ One could have done with a closer exploration of this tension, which is absent from the Kesey. As it is, it is perhaps the most disconcerting and resonant element in Forman's remarkable film.