Plot: 1963. With a few months left in his sentence, thirty-eight year old convict Randall Patrick McMurphy - "Mac" - serving time for several assaults and statutory rape, has just been transferred from a labor camp associated with Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton to a psychiatric hospital. Mac has been able to use acting "crazy" - having a belligerent and smart-alecky attitude and anti-authoritarian behavior - to his benefit in not having to do any work. He is at the hospital as the authorities at Pendleton want him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to prove he is not crazy, believing this is all an act to get out of work. He believes this stint will get him out of any more work while he serves out the remainder of his sentence. He is placed in a ward with a group of men who have differing degrees of lucidity and control of their mental faculties. He continues to behave in the same manner as always to get what he wants, using the other patients either as accessories or things for his own amusement. He adds to his list of goals to do anything to annoy the ward's tyrannical head nurse, Miss Mildred Ratched, whose seeming want is to break the spirit of any of the men in her care. In his battle with Nurse Ratched, Mac eventually tries to help the men get a voice of their own while in the hospital, and for some for their eventual return to the outside world.
Alternative Plot: When Randle Patrick McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) gets transferred for evaluation from a prison farm to a mental institution, he assumes it will be a less restrictive environment. But the martinet Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) runs the psychiatric ward with an iron fist, keeping her patients cowed through abuse, medication and sessions of electroconvulsive therapy. The battle of wills between the rebellious McMurphy and the inflexible Ratched soon affects all the ward's patients.
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