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Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (first published in 1962) has sold millions of paperback copies and been particularly popular with college students. The hero. Randle Patrick McMurphy, epitomizes, especially for the young, a nonconformist's struggle against the oppressive social system. The mental ward's patients- the Acutes, the Chronics, the Vegetables- have counterparts outside the hospital. The hospital's hierarchical power structurewith the Big Nurse as castrator at its top- reflects the cold, calculating machinations of a repressive society that disregards civil rights and destroys individuality.
In 1963, David Merrick and Edward Lewis produced Dale Wassermann dramatized version of Cuckoo's Nest at the Cort Theatre, and Kirk Douglas starred as Rändle P. McMurphy. I did not see this early dramatization, but I did see the later production of Wassermann play when it opened off-Broadway in 1971 at the Mercer-Hansberry Theatre, where applauding young audiences rooted for McMurphy as he struggled against Nurse Ratched, agent of the Combine.1 More recently, a film version of Cuckoo's Nest was adapted by screen writers Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman and directed by Milos Forman, starring Jack Nicholson as McMurphy and Louise Fletcher as the Big Nurse. The film won five Oscars at the Academy Awards, including best screenplay adapted from another medium. This was the first time since 1934 that one film got all the major awards: best picture, best actor, best actress, and best director.
Most critics have praised the movie for its realism and comic sensibility, but also have criticized its absence of "the nightmare quality that made the book a capsulized allegcry of an increasingly mad reality."2 The film audience stamped and cheered McMurphy as he battled the terrors of the mental hospital. But only the novel transforms the horrors of the mental ward into a microcosm of the complex suppression exercised by society upon its dissident members.
Ken Kesey-in a 1970 interview in Rolling Stone- expressed his wish to make a film of the Cuckoo's Nest: "I could do it weird. I could do it so that people, when they left there, they couldn't find the exit. Direct it. Direct it and write it."3 Kesey's inclination to "do it weird" is at the opposite pole from the Milos Forman movie, which accentuates realism. The...