A Remake of Cool Hand Luke? A Review of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

By Nicholas Stix

A Remake of Cool Hand Luke? A Review of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a very good movie.

From the beginning of watching it the other day, I thought of Grand Rapids Anonymous’ words: Cool Hand Luke and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest were his favorite two movies, and they were essentially the same movie.

In each movie, a new man is thrown in with a group of despairing, long-term prisoners. The new man brings light, laughter, and a touch of freedom to his comrades. The main difference is that in Luke, the prisoners are all convicts, while in Cuckoo’s Nest, they are psychiatric patients who voluntarily committed themselves. Lucious Jackson (“Luke”) did something crazy and gratuitous, but harmless: he got so liquored up, he couldn’t even speak, and chopped off the heads of a bunch of parking meters. Randall P. McMurphy, by contrast, was in jail for statutory rape (“She was 15, going on 35”) and for assaulting people, but didn’t want to work, so as a way of shirking, he acted crazy, and got himself involuntarily transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where he becomes an involuntary prisoner.

(When I was a much younger man, though well into jail age, numerous times pretty, and even beautiful girls that age made it clear to me that they were mine for the having. They all get inundated with sex ed in school. Thus, many girls that age decide that they are tired of being virgins, and would prefer a grown man deflower them. I would briefly talk to them, and then my legs would carry me away! And that’s one reason I’m still alive.)

I saw Luke in a theater when it was first released in 1967, and I saw Cuckoo’s Nest when it was first released in 1975.

Luke had such a profound effect on me that many years later, my late mom claimed that I had wept at the end. That couldn’t be true, because I was only nine years old at the time, and was not yet ready for that. But it made me weep in later years. (Maybe she was thinking of the first time I saw it on TV, a couple of years later.)

I’ve seen Luke at least four times, and a year or two ago, I adjudged it to be a Top 100 masterpiece (as did my chief of research).

Cuckoo’s Nest was a remake of Luke. Their makers were obsessed with the notion, then popular in America, of life-destroying Nazis everywhere. But while Luke transcended the silly preoccupation with Nazis, Cuckoo’s Nest did not.

(I realize that communists/racial socialists today reflexively call President Trump and all of his supporters “fascists,” but that’s just a very stupid, tired projection ritual.)

When I first drew up my list of Top 100 masterpieces, I included Cuckoo’s Nest, but a couple of years ago, I dropped it. And now I know why. Because it’s a very good movie.

Luke has one brilliant set-piece after another. Jimmy Stewart once said that movie-makers seek to provide “moments.” A masterpiece provides one grand moment after another.

Luke had a brilliant screenplay, by Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson, and brilliant everything else. Paul Newman, who was with Lee Marvin one of the dominant actors of the 1960s, gave the performance of a lifetime as Luke, as did George Kennedy (Oscar), and Lalo Schifrin composed a musical score for the ages. The picture was only up for four Oscars: Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Musical Score.

(Elmer Bernstein won the Oscar for Best Original Musical Score that year for Thoroughly Modern Millie, which may have been a make-up Oscar for The Magnificent Seven [1960], which at that point, was about the greatest movie score ever composed. The unofficial practice of voting make-up Oscars was for many years common, but it was ended in the age of communism/racial socialism.)

Cuckoo’s Nest did not have a brilliant script; it had a very good one, by Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, based on Ken Kesey’s eponymous novel, and a nothing score by Jack Nitzsche (Oscar nomination). It was nominated for nine Oscars. It won for Best Picture (Saul Zaentz, Michael Douglas); Best Director (Milos Forman); Best Actor (Jack Nicholson); Best Actress (Louise Fletcher); and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman).

Between the dialogue Pierson wrote for Luke and the virtuoso delivery of the players, it was full of great lines. In the hands of Strother Martin, “What we have here, is a failure to communicate,” became the phrase of the year, repeated a billion times across the country. “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.” “That Luke smile.” “That ol’ Luke was a world-shaker.” “Takin’ it off, Boss.”

In contrast, Cuckoo’s Nest had cursing, lots of cursing. Cursing isn’t “realistic”; with rare exceptions, it’s just stupid.

Luke also had about it an intensity that Cuckoo’s Nest lacked.

And Luke was a much more sympathetic character than McMurphy (Nicholson).

Both movies had troupes of brilliant actors, but one troupe had much less to work with. As far as Nicholson goes, he’s a very good actor, but those of us who followed his later career learned that he was just “being Jack.” I doubt he deserved any of the three Oscars he won, or that Cuckoo’s Nest deserved any of the five Oscars it won (Best Actor, Actress, Picture, Screenplay and Director).

Speaking of Oscars, Cuckoo’s Nest was nominated for nine (also for Best Music, Original Dramatic Score (Jack Nitzsche); Best Supporting Actor (Brad Dourif); Best Cinematography (Haskell Wexler); and Best Editing (Richard Chew, Lynzee Klingman, and Sheldon Kahn). Although Luke was the best picture of 1967, it wasn’t even up for that academy award, nor for best director (Bob Rafelson). (Its distributor, Warner Bros./Seven Arts, apparently didn’t campaign hard enough for it.) The Best Director Oscar went to Mike Nichols that year, for The Graduate. The Best Picture Oscar went to In the Heat of the Night, a racial message movie. Rod Steiger, from Heat, won for Best Actor, because the Academy decided it was his year, and because he’d been nominated but lost out for a powerful performance in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, a Holocaust movie, in 1965. The Academy gave Newman his make-up Oscar 19 years later, for a weak performance in Walter Tevis, Richard Price, and Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986).

(An interesting, historical backstory: According to imdb.com, in a case of poetic justice, Louise Fletcher, an unknown, got the role of Nurse Mildred Ratched [read: Wretched], only after four famous actresses turned it down, “Anne Bancroft, Ellen Burstyn, Colleen Dewhurst and Jane Fonda. Bancroft and Dewhurst turned down the role because they found it anti-feminist and downright misogynistic.”)

Dog Day Afternoon, from the same year, was a much better picture, a masterpiece, if not a Top 100 masterpiece, and deserved almost all of the Oscars that Cuckoo’s Nest won. A perusal of the list from that year will tell you that Cuckoo’s Nest won for Best Adapted Screenplay, while Dog Day Afternoon (Frank Pierson, again!) won for Best Original Screenplay. That’s ridiculous. Pierson wrote a brilliant screenplay, but it wasn’t original. It was based on a marvelous example of long-form journalism which I read in 1972 or ‘73 in New York Magazine.

There is a profound aspect to Cuckoo’s Nest’s title: One flew; only one.