On Being Sane In Insane Places.

Rating: 8/10 (6 March 2016)

If you enjoyed "Cool Hand Luke" you'll enjoy this for similar reasons. A rogue is thrown into a total institution with a gaggle of passive inmates, organizes them and gains their admiration and allegiance, goes too far, and is defeated by the agents of social control.
In both films the story is gripping, exuberant, painful, and allegorical. The psychiatric hospital of 1963 is no more the enemy here than the Southern prison camp. It's the social system with its demands that is the target, and the figure who rebels against the rules is its Prometheus.
In both films, too, you'll find sterling performances in the lead roles and among the supporting players. It's one of Jack Nicholson's best, and the director, Milos Forman, isn't afraid to use the editor in order to make the most of it.
One of the supporting actors, Louise Fletcher, won an Academy Award for her performance, and she deserved it, just as George Kennedy deserved his for "Cool Hand Luke." Fletcher's features and demeanor are perfectly suited to the role of Nurse Ratched, the personification of the social system. Her face seems made of half-melted wax, changing subtlety from fake-pleasant to honest resentment at Nicholson's leaching away of her power over the inmates.
There's a knowingness in her anger, as if, underneath the robotic ministrations, there's an extremely perceptive apparatus at work. She reminds me of a stern arithmetic teacher, specifically Miss Velma Spurge, a knotty spinster, of Hillside High School, may her soul be barbecued for eternity.
I don't think I'll get into the plot. It's full of surprises. So was the author of the work, Ken Kesey, who was a kind of link between the Beatniks of the late 50s and the hippies that came later and drew their inspiration from acid and a general taste for the colorful and the sensational. Kesey was a genuine innovator. His novel, on which this film is based, is written from the point of view of the Indian chief. Kesey was also the focal point of Tom Wolf's book, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," one of the rare instances in which Wolf finds something to admire about noncomformists.
See it.