Okay, wow, I think this might be the single movie that has been most destroyed by the passage of time. If you read reviews of it from 1975, you’ll find that it’s about Nurse Ratched’s domineering, power-hungry rule over a mental institution that is challenged by a life-affirming Jack Nicholson, who reminds the patients of what it is to be alive. If you’re like me and barely knew anything about the film, you may actually have absorbed such a negative picture of Nurse Ratched that you think she’s some kind of killer/horror figure who poisons and lobotomizes her patients.

But in fact, none of that is in the movie at all. What the movie actually is, is that a racist sex criminal played by Jack Nicholson pretends to be insane so that he can serve out his prison sentence from what he assumes is the cushy environs of a mental hospital. This seems like a stupid idea, and that’s because he’s a stupid man who makes stupid choices.

(Dawning thought: There’s a part where the hospital administrator is like, “you’ve gotten in five fights,” and Jack is all, “Rocky Marciano has been in 40 fights, and he’s a hero,” and the administrator kinda shrugs. To me this reads, as it must, as “okay, you dipshit, I’m not arguing with a mental patient about the social construction of violence.” But I wonder if people in 1975 viewed this as Jack Nicholson speaking truth to power and telling it like it is, man.)

Anyway, the hospital is of course run along fairly regimented lines, because… it’s a mental hospital. Nurse Ratched presides over it with cool efficiency and unflappability. She clearly dislikes Jack’s disruptive dickfuck of a character, as he’s always stirring up one variety of shit or another, but mostly she keeps that dislike suppressed behind a mask of cool professionalism.

And so anyway, Jack keeps doing stupider and stupider shit, and at one point he has some of his female friends come visit and bring a bunch of liquor. They have a giant party and trash the place, and one of the women ends up sleeping with a young Brad Dourif, who is a patient there.

The next morning, Nurse Ratched arrives; here’s the place the movie makes her into a cartoon villain because she gets super-slut-shamy at Brad Dourif and is all “I’m going to tell your mother and she’ll be so disappointed in you” in a really weird way that is wildly out of character with who she’s been this whole movie. So of course he immediately kills himself to drive home how bad she is, and then Jack Nicholson strangles her nearly to death.

Apparently the audience at the time applauded Nicholson’s attempted murder here? Which is pretty fucking horrifying, really.

At the end of the day, this is basically a movie that glorifies misogyny, that vilifies a woman in power for having the temerity to be a woman in power — you will not be surprised to remember/learn that Hillary Clinton was compared to Nurse Ratched by her opponents. And along with that, it views Jack Nicholson — in prison for having sex with a 15-year-old girl, and thoroughly unrepentant about it — as a counter-cultural hero. It says nothing good about 1975 that this movie was received so favorably then, and it says less good that it’s still put on lists like this in relative modernity.

This isn’t a good movie at any level — even taking it on its own terms, it’s like a sub-par, badly-shot, made-for-TV version of Dead Poets Society — but even if it were, the misogyny at its core would make it unwatchable. Avoid.