One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1975/Warner Blu-ray Gift Set)

Picture: B- Sound: C+ Extras: B Film: B+

PLEASE NOTE: The film has since been issued and an outstanding 4K edition and you can read more about it at this link:

https://fulvuedrive-in.com/review/16735/Beau+Geste+(1926/Paramount/Aircraft+Blu-ray)/CODA

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 Cuckoo'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 re-stigmatized 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 lossy, 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 Cuckoo 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.

- Nicholas Sheffo