10 Movies SIGNIFICANTLY Better Than The Book
3. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
The film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the most celebrated films of all time, earning five Academy awards and cementing Jack Nicholson as one of the great Hollywood actors. The source material is almost equally as strong.
That the film managed to improve on the material came down to being able to take what works best in the novel and streamline it for film. Some of the characters are compressed and the cool, calm evil of Nurse Ratched is played to perfection by Louise Fletcher.
The novel's setting and mood are captured perfectly, displayed in stark realism. Milos Forman, who directed the film, invited Nicholson and Fletcher to view what electroshock therapy actually looked like, allowing a deeper performance from both. The filming was done in Oregon State Hospital, alongside several actual inmates.
The novel is both an exploration of and argument against institutionalization, something that Kesey had worked against as part of the Civil Rights movement. It works to show that locking people up does not always garner the best response. The movie narrows this down to a more directed battle of wills between Ratched and Nicholson's McMurphy, slowly allowing his wildness to be cornered by her before she eventually destroys him utterly.
Ultimately, Kesey himself did not like what the filmmakers did with his story. He filed suit and won a settlement in court, claiming that he never actually saw the full movie. While he may disagree, it is a film that stands the test of time, owing in large part to its two central performances.