Pushing the Boundaries: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) 4K Restoration
Director: Miloš Forman Run Time: 133 min. Rating: R Release Year: 1975
Starring: Brad Dourif, Danny DeVito, Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William Redfield
Country: United States
Language: English
The 1970s: Pushing the Boundaries
A Film Center retrospective on the most groundbreaking films to come out of the 1970s.
See more Pushing the BoundariesAbout the film:
Winner of five Academy Awards at the 1976 Academy Awards including Best Picture.
When Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson in an Oscar winning performance) gets transferred for evaluation from a prison farm to a mental institution, he assumes it will be a less restrictive environment. But the martinet Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher, also in an Academy Award winning performance) runs the psychiatric ward with an iron fist, keeping her patients cowed through abuse, medication and sessions of electroconvulsive therapy. The battle of wills between the rebellious McMurphy and the inflexible Ratched soon affects all the ward’s patients.
“As direct and simple as it is funny and moving, this is a masterpiece of dramatic naturalism.”
—Colin Kennedy, Empire
About the filmmaker:
Miloš Forman was one of the most celebrated and well known Czechoslovakian filmmakers of all time. Both of Forman’s parents died in concentration camps during World War II, leaving him orphaned at a very young age. Eventually, Forman studied screenwriting at the Prague Film Academy. Two of his last films made in Czechoslovakia, Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967), earned international acclaim and earned nominations for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards. In 1968, Forman left Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia and entered the United States following the Prague Spring. A hot name in Hollywood following the success of both Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967), Forman jumped into directing American films with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). The film earned nine Academy Award nominations and garnered five wins—for Best Picture, Director, Lead Actor, Lead Actress, and Adapted Screenplay—at the 1976 Academy Awards. Not long after, Forman topped his already impressive list of accolades when his film Amadeus (1984) earned 11 Academy Award nominations and nine wins, including Best Picture and Best Director, at the 1985 Academy Awards.
See our upcoming films