Article #249409

26 February 1976: An example of how a subject possibly destined for the art circuit can be hoist by its bootstraps into the commercial field and festooned with Oscar nominations

Milo Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Odeon, Leicester Square) is about an attempted coup in an insane asylum engineered by an inmate called McMurphy who faces and morally defeats the standard-bearer of authority, a hatchet-faced nurse for whom sanctity means order rather than freedom. Taken from a widely read novel by Ken Kesey, it is a prime example of how a subject which must have looked destined for the cultural ghetto of the art circuit can be hoist by its bootstraps into the commercial field and festooned with Oscar nominations.

You can do this of course only by making compromises – by engaging a star with redoubtable box office muscle by jollying your audience along a little before the real crunch comes, and by using as much pure skill as you can muster while working within a fairly conventional framework. Kesey’s book, structured quite differently, made its mark another way. It became, by allowing no compromise at all, a kind of sixties classic that went overground because everybody wanted to be let in on the fashionable secrets of the counter-culture.