MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST
Direction: Milos Forman. Screenplay: Lawrence Hauben and
Bo Goldman, after the novel by Ken Kesey. Cinematography:
Haskell Wexler, Bill Butler; additional cinematography:
William A. Fraker. Production design: Paul Sylbert. Editing:
Richard Chew. Music: Jack Nitzsche. Production: Saul
Zaentz, Michael Douglas.
The players: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William
Redfield, Brad Dourif, Will Sampson, Sidney Lassick, Danny
De Vito, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, Dean R.
Brooks, Scatman Crothers, Marya Small.
In just about every Jack Nicholson performance there is a
moment (often more than one moment) when Nicholson's
face reflects something suddenly and deeply wrong with the
universe. In Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
one of those moments of both recognition and profound
confusion comes after Billy has been trundled off to bed with
Mac's 'girlfriend Candy and McMurphy has disposed himself
near the open window to wait. He begins by sharing some
rum with Chief Bromden and finally sinks to a sitting
position on the floor. Closeup on Nicholson's face. He smiles,
glancing in the direction Billy and Candy have gone, and then
without warning or apparent reason the grin drops from
sight, McMurphy's mouth opens slightly, and his brows pull a
little closer together. The window is open behind him, but
somehow you know (regardless of whether you've read the
book or the play) that McMurphy will not be crawling
through it, and you're not really sure why. After a moment,
the smile creeps back onto Nicholson's face, but then his eyes
close and we cut to the next morning, the window still open,
McMurphy and the Chief passed out underneath it.
lt could, be argued that Forman lets the camera linger a
mite too long on Nicholson's face. In The Passenger,
Antonioni does the same thing with Nicholson, and the result
is totally different, and, I think, slightly more credible-not
because Antonioni might be a better director (whether he is
or isn't is beside the point) but because his wasted
intellectual protagonists can more naturally evoke the ennui
that lies at the bottom of their souls. McMurphy, needless to
say, is not presented as the introspective type, and yet
Forman lets more of Nicholson's brooding (shades of Bobby
Dupree contemplating himself in the mirror at the end of
Five Easy Pieces) seep into the scene than seems consistent
with the rest of the performance. To a point, one must
sympathize with Forman's brief indulgence. Here he is with
Jack Nicholson on his hands, and Nicholson is so good at
doing that sort of thing that it would be difficult to shoot a
whole movie without giving Nicholson at least one of those
quietly volcanic moments in which to unload all that barely
submerged chaos. And in a way, Nicholson's changing facial
expression-and everything underneath it-at that particular
moment is the story's turningpoint, but its overtness seems
more than anything to underline a lack of clarity: what is
going through McMurphy's mind right then?
Part of the problem may derive from an uncertainty about
point of view. The nature of Forman's dilemma may be
hinted at in that lingering closeup where there seems to be an
out-of-balance tension between what is essentially Nicholson
and what is supposedly McMurphy; the tension is something
which Forman seems generally to be conscious of, and which
he tries to keep in balance by carefully handling McMurphy's
part in a way that prevents McMurphy's point of view from
becoming our point of view as well. For while Nicholson is
the kind of actor it's damned hard not to watch every second
he's on the screen, McMurphy is scarcely the sort of
protagonist you want unequivocally to identify with. When it
comes to holding these two tendencies in some kind of moral
and aesthetic balance (being engrossed by Nicholson's performance
without adopting an overly empathetic relationship
with McMurphy), Forman's sensitivity to the people he is
filming proves to be his saving grace. For instance, when
McMurphy begins lambasting some poor guy in a wheelchair
who doesn't know what's going on in the world and the
audience is beginning to react with a few scattered laughs
(McMurphy wants another vote in favor of watching the
World Series on television) the subtlest camera movement
suddenly brings Nurse Ratched into the frame as well, and
her presence makes it much more difficult to think that the
way McMurphy treats some of the patients is in any way
funny. Time and again Forman does this kind of thingperhaps
using a series of cuts to bring us away from
McMurphy and back into the larger context of the group.
The result is a subtle modulation of an overall point of view
that allows Forman to maintain an essentially compassionate
undertone by keeping us always in touch with the patients as
a community of human beings.
Often this feeling of community spills over into the very
atmosphere the characters exist in, creating a strongly unified
tract of dramatic and psychological space that provides an
intense intimacy within the world of the mental ward. As
peripherally an ambient detail as a somewhat motley group
of mu sicians who play flutes and guitars just outside the fence
when McMurphy comes out for the first basketball sequence
turns into something like a leitmotif when, during the next
outing, only their music seeps onto the soundtrack, as though
its pastorallightheadedness and charm were as much a part of
the air surrounding and penetrating those cyclone fences as
Nurse Ratched's mind-dulling Muzak is a part of the
communal room insidethe hospital. But when it comes time
to explode that sense of unity (as well as confinement) with a
venture out into the world world-when McMurphy hijacks
the bus and boat-we are struck by a palpable freedom
reflected in the stares of the patients as they pass along the
ordinary streets of an ordinary town as though coursing
through some magically alien environment-and at the same
time we're hit with a realization of the suddenly incongruous
makeshift quality of Forman's conception and direction of
the sequence. Where do we draw the line? Where is the
elated/paranoid point of view of the patients to be differentiated
from a wobbly directorial aptitude for handling an
outdoor action and comedy sequence (slapsticky comedy at
that) in a film where such a placid and reflective manner of
depicting people as Forman's is more successfully realized in
his articulation of a collective spirit and his almost Bergmanesque
poetry of the human face?
Forman seems most comfortable in the confined, often
claustrophobic domain of the ward where he can orchestrate
the human components of his mise-en-scene in a way that
accentuates that poetry and hence leads to an essential
stylistic distinction in Forman's work that has a lot to do
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