That's when the movie works, and what it's best at. If Forman had stayed at that level -- introducing his characters and making them real, and then seeing how they changed as they bounced off one another -- "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" might have been a great film. It's a good one as it is, but we can see the machinery working.
Take, for example, the all-night orgy that finally hands McMurphy over to his doom. He's smuggled booze and broads into the ward, and everyone gets drunk, and then the hapless Billy (Brad Dourif) is cheerfully bundled into a bedroom with a willing girl. Billy stutters so badly he can hardly talk, but he's engaging and intelligent, and we suspect his problems are not incurable. The next morning, as Nurse Ratched surveys the damage, Billy at first defies her (speaking without a stutter, which is too obvious) and then caves in when she threatens to tell his mother what he's done. Nurse Ratched and Billy's mother are old friends, you see (again, too obvious, pinning the rap on Freud and Mom). Billy commits suicide, and we're invited to stand around his pitiful corpse and see the injustice of it all -- when all we've really seen is the plot forcing an implausible development out of unwilling subject matter.
Another scene that just doesn't work, because it's too heavily burdened with its purpose, occurs when McMurphy escapes, commandeers a school bus, and takes all the inmates of the ward on a fishing trip in a stolen boat. The scene causes an almost embarrassing break in the movie -- it's Forman's first serious misstep -- because it's an idealized fantasy in the midst of realism. By now, we've met the characters, we know them in the context of hospital politics, and when they're set down on the boat deck, they just don't belong there. The ward is the arena in which they'll win or lose, and it's not playing fair -- to them, as characters -- to give them a fishing trip.
Even as I'm making these observations, though, I can't get out of my mind the tumultuous response that "Cuckoo's Nest" received from its original audiences. Even the most obvious, necessary, and sobering scenes -- as when McMurphy tries to strangle Nurse Ratched to death -- were received, not seriously, but with sophomoric cheers and applause. Maybe that's the way to get the most out of the movie -- see it as a simple-minded antiestablishment parable -- but I hope not. I think there are long stretches of a very good film to be found in the midst of Forman's ultimate failure, and I hope they don't get drowned in the applause for the bad stuff that plays to the galleries.
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