Posted on 11/19/2025 12:56:27 PM PST by Kid Shelleen
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“Cuckoo’s Nest” was first released in the U.S. on Nov. 19, 1975, and won all five major Academy Awards the following year. Based on the 1962 novel by Oregon writer Ken Kesey, it tells the story of a struggle against authoritarian control, embodied in the clash between free-spirited patient Randle McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, the tyrannical head nurse of an Oregon psychiatric hospital.
(Excerpt) Read more at opb.org ...
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Also introduced one of the all-time great anti-heroes and villains.
I have a crush on Nurse Ratchett. After hours.
Wasn’t Nurse Rachet the inspiration for the phrase “Bitch on wheels”?
Saw this when I was young. Around 16. Then watched it again about a year or so and got a different perspective of the movie.
PS. Still a good movie.
I thought that was Hillary Clinton..
McMurphy: Now jump up there and put the ball in the basket.
The difference between now and then... 50 years ago they had mental institutions... Now the mental institution is outside your front door, and you walk by the mentally ill everyday on your way to work or the grocery store.
I hope the residents of Portland are proud of their virtue.
It is staring them in the face as they walk over homeless people and needles and filth on public streets.
Deinstitutionalization - I see mentally ill people everywhere.
“Want some gum? Thank you, I like Juicy Fruit”.
Portland is an open-air lunatic asylum.
Did you ever see the Jesse Waters show and Johnny doing man on the street interviews. It's scary.
We read that book in high school English class before the movie came out. It was a great book but a lousy movie.
Critic John Simon pointed out that in the book, after Big Nurse shamed Billy Bibbitt into committing suicide, McMurphy walked up to her and tore open her nurse’s uniform to expose her huge maternal bossom, meant to humiliate her, as if to say “ don’t you have a heart”. Psychiatric nurses are not supposed to shame their patients into committing suicide, they are supposed to prevent them from committing suicide. McMurphy believes a nurse being female should be warm, nuturing, protecting, like a mother. Big Nurse was a monster. There was no nurturing, no protecting, just control.
The movie miscast McMurphy with Jack Nicholson, and miscast Big Nurse with skinny, flat chested...what’s her name? Louise Fletcher.
In the book, McMurphy gets lobotomized for tearing a uniform, which is an injustice....no due process...just torture.
In the movie, Jack Nicholson’s McMurphy responds to Big Nurse shaming Billy Bibbitt into committing suicide, by strangling her with intent to murder her, it takes the whole staff to pry his hands off her neck. When McMurphy is lobotomized for being violently insane, it does not seem as unjust...and McMurphy’s actions do not seem so reciprocal or understandable. He just wanted to see Big Nurse’s breasts in the book....he was a coarse character who chose mental hospital to avoid prison. .....but to Ken Kesey, Big Nurses bosom represented the maternal, the warm and nurturing.....which is the real reason why grown men find themselves attracted to and staring at female breasts.....ie, there is a child inside who remembers being nursed. Females also admit to staring at other female’s bosom, because they once also were babies nursing at their mommy’s breasts......but because of political correctness, males are supposed to feel ashamed of noticing female breasts, and women who notice female breasts are taught to believe it makes them gay or bi.
He was also a “Merry Prankster”.
Kesey also wrote another great novel called “Sometimes a great notion” about Oregon logging.
Robert “Chief” Parrish of the great Celtics/Bird teams got his nickname from that character.
“Where do you suppose she lives?” —RPM
Paul Newman was in the movie version of the book that was titled “Never Give an Inch” in the theaters. Nowhere near as good as the book though.
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