Cuckoo's still crazy – and great - after all these years

'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is 50 years old and Milos Forman's barbed mental hospital tale remains an underdog story for the ages in more ways than one

- By Xan Brooks

Age has not withered One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Milos Forman’s barnstorming account of the men who were once labelled lunatics inside what was once called an asylum. Shifting social attitudes can’t blunt its barbed comedy or draw the sting of a drama that pits timid patients against the icy, rigid Nurse Ratched. Time, if anything, has only sharpened the film's edges, so that it feels more lawless and hazardous than it did in the past. Lovingly dusted down and reissued for posterity, it swaggers into cinemas this week like Randle Patrick McMurphy into the Oregon state mental hospital.

Forman’s film is now 50, a solid, respectable age, except that Cuckoo's Nest has never really been respectable, let alone staid and settled, and more resembles a disreputable uncle who struck gold and joined the country club. It was an orphan, an outlier, rejected by every major studio until United Artists picked it up; the unruly underdog that went on to clean up at the Oscars and become the second-highest-grossing picture of the year behind Jaws (1975).

Most movie classics are the industry’s equivalent of elder statesmen or museum exhibits, coddled by history or pinned under glass. Cuckoo's Nest, though, continues to twist and turn in our grasp. It’s a film of its era – a dinosaur even – and yet it doesn’t feel dated and speaks across party lines. Cuckoo’s Nest loves freedom, self-sufficiency and the pursuit of personal happiness, and is therefore beloved by both old-school hippies and hard-right Maga types. Each side can claim that the film shares their values. Each sees itself in McMurphy while regarding the other side as Nurse Ratched.

The production was a scramble; it ran on adrenaline and confusion.