Jack Nicholson At 80: His 10 Best Performances

McMurphy deliberately exhibits mentally unstable behaviour at a prison farm and is subsequently sent to a mental institution, believing it will be a far more cushier environment in which to serve out the rest of his sentence for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl. However, what ensues at the hospital is anything but cushy for the infectious troublemaker.

Nicholson's character engages in an equally hilarious and poignant battle of wills and wits between himself and the picture's main antagonist, the tyrannical Nurse Ratched. McMurphy befriends the other patients (a cast including Christopher Lloyd and Danny DeVito) and begins to cause chaos and disruption that liberates them in the face of Ratched's authoritarian rule.

The memorable ways in which McMurphy does this include: getting a seemingly mute Chief Bromden to talk; breaking himself and the others out and taking a fishing trip; and organising a prostitute friend to have sex with virgin Billy Bibbit, although that, sadly, turned out to be one act of liberal insubordination too far.

In the end, Ratched has McMurphy lobotomised for his own good. Gone is his spirit and effervescence, a state of mind the Chief simply cannot bear to leave him in. The music that accompanies McMurphy's death is hauntingly beautiful.