[In the following excerpt, Wood compliments Forman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, noting that Forman's quieter, more realistic approach to the material adds sensitivity to the story.]

Kubrick is attracted by apparent impossibilities. Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon are all, in their different ways, highly literary texts, works that seem to defy translation into film. (“How did they ever make a film of Lolita?” the advertising asked when the movie was first released—although the question was not prompted by the texture of Nabokov's prose. One critic tartly replied, “They didn't.”) Ken Kesey is neither Nabokov nor Burgess nor Thackeray, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest seems to invite translation into film as much as the other books defy it. And yet Miloš Forman [in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest], oddly enough, runs into much the same problems as Kubrick, although with different results.

Kesey's novel is narrated by Chief Broom Bromden, an inmate in a mental hospital who pretends to be deaf and dumb. The Chief sees metaphors. When men are described as rabbits, the rabbits hop before his eyes. When the head nurse on his ward gets angry, the Chief watches the transformation:

So she really lets herself go and her painted smile twists, stretches to an open snarl, and she blows up bigger and bigger, big as a tractor, so big I can smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load. …

The Chief knows what he knows:

Yes. This is what I know. The ward is a factory for the Combine. It's for fixing up mistakes made in the neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the hospital is. When a completed product goes back out into society, all fixed up good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings joy to the Big Nurse's heart: something that came in all twisted different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the whole outfit and a marvel to behold. Watch him sliding across the land with a welded grin. …

Of course the Chief's paranoia may be truer than our supposed sanity, and that is precisely his argument: “It's the truth,” he says of his story, “even if it didn't happen.” The game being played here, our implication in the Chief's vision and our resistance to it, our attempts to see it as just crazy or just literary, even our desire to believe in it, is a special, bookish form of hide-and-seek, which requires text and readers, can't be played with images on a screen and an audience in a cinema.

Kubrick replaces that sort of irony—Thackeray's inviting his readers to an understanding of Barry which is not Barry's own—with poker-faced art. Forman replaces it with a gentle, under-played realism, something which is the opposite of Kesey's hyperbole. The monstrous Big Nurse of the novel is not a monster in the movie, but simply a handsome, hard-faced, flat-voiced, infinitely patient and sensible woman. Louise Fletcher's performance in this role is quite extraordinary. She is the nurse/teacher/social worker from countless soap operas tilted toward nightmare by the sheer relentlessness of her professional behavior. She has disappeared into the deceiving manners of her job, and Fletcher, under Forman's direction, catches perfectly the horrible inhumanity of kindly, comprehending phrases offered without either kindness or comprehension, indeed systematically used to keep people under control.

It is as if the metallic politeness of a telephone operator those courteous words rattled out in that synthetic voice, were used on us daily to keep us in our place. And as if we actually needed to hear that voice, since real madness, for Kesey and Forman, is submission, acceptance of the tyranny of the so-called sane. The ward of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, many of whose inhabitants are voluntary patients, becomes a fierce figure for the consent of the governed. We consent not only to be governed, we consent to be oppressed. We ask to be oppressed. Kesey would say no doubt that all government is oppression, but Forman's view seems milder (or is it just the Seventies nudging down the Sixties—Kesey's novel was published in 1962): governments oppress us because they have the power to do so, and because we allow them to.

Forman's restraint then gets a lot of the effects of Kesey's exaggerations. Or rather, Forman persuades his actors to get these effects for him (Kubrick can't, or won't, get anything from his actors, because he is too busy using them as coat-hangers and moveable foregrounds for his insistent backgrounds). There is not only Fletcher, there is also Jack Nicholson, as a roughneck who undertakes the liberation of the ward, only to end up lobotomized and then killed in kindness by the Chief.

The tone of the whole film is really set by Nicholson's early interview with the hospital doctor, which is such a sly, amiable, whispered, chatty, smiling affair that it seems crazier than any more flamboyant madness could possibly be, and throughout the movie Nicholson looks sensible, bewildered, wily, and zany by turns, and in ways that test the idea of sanity not logically but visually. What does it mean to look sane? We know what it means to look crazy, since the film first shows us the inmates of the ward as a caricatured bunch of freaks. But then one of Forman's achievements is to make us feel so easy with these men that we simply stop thinking of them as crazy and see them as the victims of the Nurse and the system and their own fears.

A single, brilliant moment in the movie pulls all this beautifully together. Nicholson is leading the men from the ward on a deep-sea fishing expedition. As they board the boat, a man from the marina asks them what they think they are doing. Nicholson hesitates, then says, “We're from the State mental institution.” There is a pause, during which we wait for whatever remark can possibly follow this. Then Nicholson continues, introducing each of the men in turn, “This is Dr. Harding. This is Dr. Cheswick. Dr. Bibbitt. Dr. Scanlon. …” As the camera reaches each face, the men straighten up, put on serious expressions, nod like celebrities being presented on television, and actually look like doctors. A moment ago they were lunatics in scruffy sweaters, and now they are doctors on their day off, wearing their old clothes. The joke here is not simply the old gag about doctors in mental hospitals being indistinguishable from their patients, it is also a suggestion of genuine liberty. We look like whatever we choose to call ourselves, and the camera proves it. If we call ourselves crazy, or allow ourselves to be called crazy, we shall look crazy.

Of course, real madness disappears in such perspectives. And while the cheerful, libertarian politics of the film are appealing, the literalism of Forman's rendering of the ward—tiled floors, starched uniforms, clanging cage-like doors and the rest—makes one wonder about actual mental hospitals in the world outside the movie. About the hospital in Oregon where the movie was shot, for example. Can it be true that the insane are merely scared, that it's all the Nurse's fault, and that a good fuck would cure many a pathology? Isn't there something unfeeling about such optimism? Kesey's novel doesn't prompt such questions, because it is safe inside the Chief's narration (“It's the truth even if it didn't happen”), but Forman's movie does, and thus reminds us how simplified it is, both psychologically and politically. I believe political repression is bad under any circumstances, and I don't doubt that many mental hospitals come all too close to Kesey's and Forman's descriptions. But the movie still evades madness itself, as it evades all serious political issues, because it just sorts out the good guys from the bad guys, the victims from the nurses.

The shallowness of this very attractive film probably comes from Forman's unwillingness to tolerate (and inability to dismiss) the ugly assumptions that lurk at all the edges of the story: women are all either nurses or whores; blacks (in the guise of ward attendants) are the world's sadists and creeps; the only hope of innocence is for scared white males led by an amiable jailbird. The presence of an Indian in the novel and the movie is a sentimental gesture, camouflage for the prejudices at work elsewhere. As I say, I think Forman is too generous to let all this out of the bag, but he hasn't fully succeeded in imposing on it his own amiable brand of anarchism, and the result is a movie with its foundations missing.