One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 50th Anniversary

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tells the story of a free-spirited rogue who takes over the ward of a mental hospital by a combination of chutzpah and ingenuity. The film is based on Ken Kesey’s best-selling novel published in 1962. Using the madhouse to symbolize the individual against the system, the story gets its power from its unforgettable ensemble of characters and accretion of details that reveal what life is about inside a mental institution. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest swept the top five Oscars in 1976, the first film to do so since It Happened One Night in 1934.