One Flew Over The Cookoo’s Nest (1975/Warner Blu-ray Gift Set)
Picture:
B- Sound: C+ Extras: B Film: B+
It is
sometimes hard to convey how much of a breakout film some classics are and that
happens in part because their influence becomes seamless, their influence so
natural a line that you have to really look and think before you can understand
how a great film becomes great. A great
way to understand this can be applied to several films, but Milos Forman’s One
Flew Over The Cookoo’s Nest (1975) is a particularly good example,
especially on its 35th Anniversary.
Warner now releases its second Blu-ray edition with a few more goodies
in a gift set.
When the
film arrived in 1975, with a still-present counterculture, it deal with
something taboo that is still taboo today to some extent, but was much more
ill-defined at the time and has been restigmatized by certain political
interests in the 1980s for the ugliest and most unacceptable of reasons: mental
illness. Many films had dealt
intelligently with the subject and even taken us into mental institutes. Ken Kesey’s book and Dale Wasserman’s play
were already a hot property and hit before the film even got made, once
optioned by the great Kirk Douglas in what would have been yet another screen triumph
for the veteran actor and all-around Hollywood
groundbreaker.
By the
time it came to making the film, even Douglas passed on the role of criminal
patient Murphy because of age, but allowed his actor son Michael Douglas
(underrated then, underrated now) to take over the project as producer. He was joined by Producer Saul Zaentz who
only produces choice projects, then the unforgettable cast started to sign on,
including Jack Nicholson in the total power of his inarguable early prime and
other names and named to be like Danny DeVito, Scatman Crothers, Christopher
Lloyd, Brad Dourif, Vincent Schiavelli, Will Sampson, Mews Small and the
terrific Louise Fletcher in the unforgettable, thankless role of Nurse Ratched.
Nicholson’s
McMurphy, a criminal and child rapist, is committed to a mental hospital and
into an environment where he must conform to become “well” or at least have
some kind of limited freedom to survive, as Nurse Ratched calmly explains. At first, she seems reasonable, but then we
start to discover that she is more of a power-monger than it would first seem,
seamless hidden by her gift for manipulation and “psychology”, but she will not
be able to subdue McMurphy as easily as the others and their private war inside
the mental ward is about to being.
Never had
a mental hospital been portrayed so honestly and it was groundbreaking in a way
that still holds up. Especially thanks
to funding rollbacks in the 1980s, mental hospitals have changed little since
and like Ratched, many like her still use mental illness and mind games as
weapons, which become part of the larger message of this film. This especially resonated as the Vietnam fiasco
was winding down and we knew how badly we were being lied to about so much.
Identity
and who we all are is also questioned, thanks in part to the screenplay by
Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman (Scent Of
A Woman, Meet Joe Black), but so
much works so well so often that the film holds up extraordinarily well and is
as accurate about human nature now as ever.
Forman was best known for his home-country hits Loves Of A Blonde and The
Fireman’s Ball, both terrific films, so he instantly established himself as
one of the great new directors in Hollywood
with this amazing work. That the cast is
believable all the time and chemistry is rampant all over the place makes it
all the more compelling to watch.
Most of
all, the film asks us to question ourselves, our prejudices and the society
around us and has lost none of its power to date to do so. Now more than ever, it deserves a serious
revisit.
Sadly,
this set offers the same 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image and dated
Dolby Digital 5.1 sound as the previous Blu-ray releases (unreviewed) and the
many DVDs before that. This film needs
restored and updated, with the sound (especially the music by Jack Nitzsche, a
regular composer for Paul Schrader) in a lossless from the original audio
masters. The cinematography by Directors
of Photography Haskell Wexler (Faces,
Medium Cool, Bound For Glory, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?) and an uncredited
Bill Butler (who lensed Jaws the
same year) has a one-of-a-kind-look.
This is the only disappointment here.
Extras
include a new 87-minutes-long documentary called Completely Cookoo with
new interviews and classic footage, the HD featurette Asylum: An Empty Nest For The Mentally Ill?, low def trailer, low
def Deleted Scenes and feature length audio commentary track complied from
various interviews by various persons involved in the making of the film. Included in the box are a deck of promotional
playing cards, Patient File with six stills of the actors as their characters
in a faux nilla file, press clip booklet and mini-reproductions of four
theatrical posters for the films inside the DigiPak DVD case and hardcover mini-booklet
with illustrations and text all about the film and the people who made it.
It is
also now available ON DEMAND and FOR DOWNLOAD exclusively with EXTRAS on iTunes
at: http://bit.ly/WBDD_Cuckoo
- Nicholas Sheffo
