Hardly a Sunday goes by without Milos Forman's film of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest getting a mention in the weekend supplements, most usually in the context of the application or misapplication of electroconvulsive therapy. Its influence is so great that if future reconstruction archaeologists were attempting to recreate a 20th-century psychiatric hospital, this film would likely be the keystone of the project.
For doctors, perhaps, the bits that grab us most (especially if we are middle-aged male psychiatrists) are the scenes where the film's protagonist, R. P. McMurphy, is interviewed by his psychiatrist, Dr John Spivey. Having already walked out a considerable distance on thin ice by allowing Forman to use his functioning state hospital in Oregon, the hospital medical director, Dr Dean Brooks, began stomping around testing the limits of that ice by agreeing to play the part of Spivey. Moreover, he agreed to the interviews with Jack Nicholson's McMurphy being ad-libbed. Aware that elements of the storyline were anachronistic (I'm looking at you, prefrontal leucotomy), Dr Brooks insisted that the credits would state that the film was not a true depiction of a modern (1970s) psychiatric hospital.
In late-life interviews Dean Brooks comes across as a fearlessly humorous man. In the film he was less the weak-willed Dr Spivey of Kesey's book and perhaps a little more like himself. This was a man who had island-hopped in the most terrifying way during World War II and who had advocated and effected considerable institutional reform in his own hospital. After all, what sort of weak-willed psychiatrist sits alone in his office with an apparent psychopath (who has the stare of stares) and accuses him of messing?
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