Louise Fletcher Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Boorman and the Devil

Director – David Kittredge – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 112m

*****

How director John Boorman’s sequel (or not) to The Exorcist became one of the biggest Hollywood flops of all time – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 25th

This quite understandably takes a while to get around to its subject, talking both about where Hollywood found itself in the 1960s and looking at Boorman’s directorial career before settling on the production that nearly destroyed his career. Once it gets there though, a considerable amount of time is allotted to a production which starts to sound like one of the most amazing spectacles ever filmed. Yet this comes alongside a feeling that, on the most fundamental level, something is going to go or perhaps has already gone horribly wrong before the director has even signed on.

By the early 1960s, Hollywood was making big budget epics like Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) or The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964). When such movies started to fail at the box office, it turned to younger directors in the hope that they might understand what audiences wanted. The result was movies like Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) or The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967).… Read the rest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

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.… Read the rest