“Trapped with no way out” at 50 | A key film for the 70s

Age has not withered Trapped with no way out (1975), the dazzling story of Milos Forman About the men who were once labeled as lunatics inside what was once called an asylum. Changing social attitudes fail to mitigate its acid humor nor does it detract from the intensity of a drama that pits shy patients against the icy and rigid Nurse Ratched. Time, if anything, has only sharpened the film’s edges, so that it feels more untamed and dangerous than it did in the past. Restored and reissued for posterity, last week returned to some cinemas around the worldlike the unforgettable Randle Patrick McMurphy of Jack Nicholson at the Oregon State Psychiatric Hospital.

Forman’s film now meets 50 years, a solid and respectable age, except that Trapped with no way out it has never really been respectable, much less boring and settled; Rather, he resembles a dishonorable uncle who made a fortune and joined a country club. He was an orphan, an outcast, rejected by all the big studios until United Artists picked it up; the indomitable loser who ended triumphing at the Oscars and becoming the second highest grossing film of the year, behind Shark (1975).

Most film classics are the industry equivalent of elderly states or museum exhibitions, pampered by history or subjected to observation under glass. However, Trapped with no way out It keeps twisting and turning in your hands. It is a film clearly of its time – even a dinosaur – and yet, doesn’t feel out of date and speaks across party lines. Trapped with no way out love freedom, self-sufficiency and the search for personal happiness, and for this reason it is loved by both old hippies and extreme right-wingers. Each side can claim that the film shares their values. Each sees himself reflected in McMurphy as he considers the other side as Nurse Ratched. (Louise Fletcher).

The production was a struggle; It worked on adrenaline and confusion. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was produced by the young Michael Douglas, 29, who inherited the project from his father, Kirk, who wanted to play McMurphy, the energetic convict who galvanizes the psychiatric ward. And he was furious when the role was given instead to Nicholson, a younger, more attractive talent, fresh out of The last duty (1973) y Chinatown (1974). Forman, a hero of the Czech New Wave, had been confined in the Chelsea Hotel recovering from a nervous breakdown when he was hired to direct, bringing his own experience of Eastern Bloc oppression to this purely American story. “The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched,” he explained.

The film was shot inside a functioning psychiatric facility, with doctors and patients embedded among the cast and crew. There was an arsonist employed in the art department. One inmate escaped through an open upstairs window (he was injured in the fall and was immediately recaptured). The budget was overflowing Tempers flared and the actors became rebellious. Virtually every day was a struggle, which served the material well, because the real-life drama boiled over and sizzled. Arriving late to the set, Nicholson was alarmed to notice that many of his companions seemed unable to break character. To rehash an old joke, you didn’t have to be crazy to work in Trapped with no way outbut it helped.

“Which one of you crazy people has guts?” asks McMurphy, the hospital’s new rowdy inmate, thus setting up a collision between him and his group with the authorities in general and Ratched in particular. The comedy It explodes like a fireworks display. The dramatic scenes They hit with the force of a hammer.

Forman’s drama was based on the Ken Kesey in the bestseller 1962, the hippie founder of the Merry Pranksters, and was considered at the time as a left-wing film, a countercultural milestone, although its language has since been appropriated and modified by the libertarian right. McMurphy hates bureaucracy, rebels against regulations, and gives patients a dose of undiluted machismo. Men are emasculated remains that need to rediscover their energy. Women are either giggly sex workers or castrating mother hens.

But the film is not without nuances and a feeling of tension complexities of life. Crucially, Fletcher’s performance as Ratched ensures that Kesey’s monster remains human. She is a harried professional, and both she and McMurphy are creatures of their time. Ratched is outnumbered and the room is under siege. It is not surprising, on balance, that it resorts to jumper cables. Years later, in 2020, The nurse character ended up having a eight episode miniseries made by star producer Ryan Murphy.

Trapped with no way out is one of those rare films that, if it grabs the viewer early, partially possesses them forever. Someone might discover it on a television rerun as a teenager and decide, at least for a while, that it must be the best movie in the world. Ea ecstasy, tragedy, comedy and fury. It looks and smells like something from real life, but at the same time it expands and roars like great music. The chronicles affirm that Forman’s command of English was so poor that he had to rely on his hearing during impromptu therapy sessions.following each actor’s voice as if it were an instrument in an orchestra: the director just yelled “cut!” when I heard an out of tune note. He also had the habit of keep three cameras recording during the living room scenes, to capture every tic, every scratch, every jerk of the head. You could say that Forman addressed in McMurphy fashion: loose and easy, wild and free, so that the film gives the impression of flowing off the screen, unfolding in real time before our eyes.

Watching it again today, it’s clear that Still looks like McMurphy, in good and bad aspects, which means that The movie has its problems. numerous psychological complexities. His critics have a point. Trapped with no way out He mistreats African American women, indigenous people, and men. Medically, too, the story is clumsy: sentimental but crude. It did for mental health nurses what Steven Spielberg’s shark did for sharks. It is a film definitely fixed in the spirit of the seventies, which would never happen today, and yet his longing for freedom is felt timelesstheir battles continue and their emotional arc moves the guts.

And, as with every work of art that endures, its ugliest aspects are an integral part of the piece. They add texture and context, and connect it to the wider world. So it will always be good news that he reappears on big anniversaries, bursting in like a drunk, constantly inclined towards disorder. It is magnificently unreconstructed; It is defective, but it is perfect. But when you see it, the impression is clear that it is not necessary to change a single frame.

* Of The Independent of Great Britain. Special for Page/12.