Expressive Film Techniques in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

When One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was released in 1975 it turned quite a few heads. A novice cast and crew with a four million dollar budget made nearly three hundred million dollars worldwide and swept the 1976 Academy Awards with their callous attack on the American bureaucracy. This filmmaking adventure was a demonstration of the American ideal while it illustrated the failure of a democracy to allow one to achieve the freedom it so adamantly endorses. The scope of this paper will include the following parameters; how the concepts of rebellion and freedom in a repressed environment are shown through mise en scene, cinematography, editing and sound.

Description

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest opens with the morning medicine call. A dozen or so men form a single file line in front of the nurses' station where they are handed a pill and a small paper cup filled with water. Welcome to the Oregon State Psychiatric Hospital. Czech director Milos Forman turned Ken Kesey's hallucinistic novel of the same title into a classic with breakout performances from Louise Fletcher (Academy Award Winner for Best Actress), Brad Dourif (Academy Award Nominee for Best Supporting Actor), Christopher Lloyd and Danny De Vito. However, it was Jack Nicholson's portrayal of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the con man faking insanity to avoid prison work camps, who stole the screen.

McMurphy's admittance into the hospital is the departure of true order. The ward is the State and is governed by a dictator, Nurse Mildred Ratched, played by Louise Fletcher. McMurphy attempts to bring joy into the lives of his fellow patients by teaching them that they're human, that they're men not little boys and that they have rights. In continually bumping heads with Nurse Ratched, Randle becomes the leader of a rebellion for true democracy and all of its ideals, most namely, freedom. He succeeds in freeing the men to a point. Only Chief Bromden (Will Sampson) finds freedom in the end.