Director – Milos Forman – 1975 – US – Cert. 18 – 133m
*****
An unpredictable new inmate unsettles the controlling nurse presiding over a hospital ward’s mental patients– out now in the UK on 4K UHD and 4K UHD Steelbook
A state hospital for the mentally ill, a live-in ward presided over by Miss Ratched (Louise Fletcher). For reasons that are never entirely clear, RP McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) arrives for a stay to evaluate his mental health. It’s also not clear whether there is anything actually wrong with him; the prison that sent him thinks he was faking it to get out of a work detail.
McMurphy finds himself on Miss Ratched’s ward, which she runs in a highly regimented fashion. He doesn’t like that, and the scene is set for a battle of the wills.
The film was originally a 1962 novel by Ken Kesey which became a play within a year with Kirk Douglas playing McMurphy. That ran on Broadway for six months, and Douglas was so taken with it that he spent most of the 1960s trying to make the film, eventually deciding on Forman as director and sending him a copy of the novel. Forman never received the book as it was seized by the Czech authorities.… Read the rest