Nicholson: The virtuoso who made film better than book.

Jack Nicholson is by far and away my favourite actor. His ability to create a consistent, recurrent theme of gentle insanity throughout his work while maintaining necessary personal and emotive aspects is, to me, incredibly talented. 

But my favourite performance of his has to be in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It is mainly credit to Nicholson that this adaptation of Ken Kesey’s original 1962 novel has a lighter, more comically entertaining outlook on institutional asylums in America at that time. 

Not that there is anything wrong with Kesey’s book. It carries intensity throughout and still has elements of humour and wit engraved as an undercurrent to the bleak reality of poor humanistic principles towards behaviourism. I just think that Nicholson’s timeless performance in the film adaptation makes the experience a lot more entertaining, solely due to his zaney on-screen personality, which gives the film version it’s purpose alongside the original novel. Maybe this takes away a fraction of the hard-hitting, thought-provoking aspects which the novel so successfully put across. But, nevertheless, I think a film’s main responsibility is to primarily entertain and then after that; inform and enlighten.

So there are my reasons why,surprisingly, I think a film adaptation is better than the original book. Despite the book’s typical further detail and depth of storyline, it can’t match up Nicholson’s virtuoso showing in the 1975 classic.