“Randle P. McMurphy, charged with assault and statutory rape - behaviour he cheerfully acknowledges but justifies - is transferred from a penal work farm to the State Mental Hospital where, suspected of faking to avoid work detail, he is held for observation. Irrepressibly cheerful, he soon clashes with Nurse Ratched, who sees her efforts to soothe disturbed minds upset by his war on apathy.... McMurphy is given shock treatment along with two other patients, one being Chief Bromden, a massive, morose, and supposedly deaf-and-dumb Indian. Chief now tells McMurphy that he is using the asylum as a refuge from the world that destroyed his father, but says that he is not ready when the delighted McMurphy invites him to escape....
“About midway through the film, two things happen, transforming a facile tract about the repressive society into an honest polemic. One is the process of terrible retribution inaugurated by McMurphy's subjection to shock treatments.... The second happening is the sudden metamorphosis, when he reveals his sanity and his ability to talk, of Chief Bromden from passive object into active subject.... When the hitherto totally wooden Indian suddenly comes alive, however, taking over McMurphy's central role as a sane man representing our own sane viewpoint, the result is that everything which happened before is simultaneously exposed as fantasy (McMurphy, in other words, is mad) and justified as a realistic emotional reaction to an intolerable situation. It is a brilliant stroke which not only provides the film with an equivalent to Kesey's subjective narrative but, in that the Indian still trails his now unspoken racial history behind him, implies that in him freedom is making its last stand against extermination....” --Tom Milne, Monthly Film Bulletin