26 February 1976: An example of how a subject possibly destined for the art circuit can be hoist by its bootstraps into the commercial field and festooned with Oscar nominations

Milo Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Odeon, Leicester Square) is about an attempted coup in an insane asylum engineered by an inmate called McMurphy who faces and morally defeats the standard-bearer of authority, a hatchet-faced nurse for whom sanctity means order rather than freedom. Taken from a widely read novel by Ken Kesey, it is a prime example of how a subject which must have looked destined for the cultural ghetto of the art circuit can be hoist by its bootstraps into the commercial field and festooned with Oscar nominations.

You can do this of course only by making compromises – by engaging a star with redoubtable box office muscle by jollying your audience along a little before the real crunch comes, and by using as much pure skill as you can muster while working within a fairly conventional framework. Kesey’s book, structured quite differently, made its mark another way. It became, by allowing no compromise at all, a kind of sixties classic that went overground because everybody wanted to be let in on the fashionable secrets of the counter-culture.

The picture, taken with Paul Thomas Anderson at this year’s Oscar nominee lunch, recalls the eerie image that closes Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic

Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro’s “jazz hands” pose in the Oscar nominee luncheon photo was part of his and fellow director Paul Thomas Anderson’s attempt to recreate the celebrated group shot, featuring Jack Nicholson, that appears at the ending of The Shining.

Del Toro responded to a post – in which he and Anderson had been inserted into the image from the 1980 horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick – by saying: “[Y]ou got it! PTA and I said: Let’s do the Shining pose and we tried.”

With debate still swirling over the unlikable nature of Marty Supreme’s careless protagonist, Guardian writers have picked their all-time love-to-hate leads

Spoilers ahead

I can remember seeing As Good As It Gets in the theater as a teenager and being pleasantly startled by the sight of Jack Nicholson’s Melvin Udall, romcom super-grouch. Here’s a bestselling romance author who disdains love, an OCD sufferer who weaponizes his affliction, a New Yorker who hates crowds (who can’t relate?). In one scene, an adoring fan asks Melvin his secret to writing women. “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability,” he says, an epic burn forever seared in my brain. Of course Melvin’s anti-charm offensive only goes so far in a James L Brooks project. Before long, the rudeness erodes as Melvin is forced on to a journey of self-discovery with the nextdoor neighbor he can’t abide (Greg Kinnear) and the diner waitress he can’t live without (Helen Hunt). Melvin comes out a changed man in the end, but retains the essence of his super-grouch-dom. That was the moment I fell in love with the writer’s life. Andrew Lawrence

The actor looks back on his first foray as producer as the Oscar-winning drama reaches its 50th anniversary

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at 50: the spirit of rebellion lives on

His early career was defined by the Vietnam war with early roles in political films such as Hail, Hero! and Summertree. So it felt natural for Michael Douglas, just 31, to make his first foray into producing with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a tale of one man raging against the system.

Fifty years since its release, Douglas is struck how Cuckoo’s Nest resonates anew in today’s landscape. “It’s about as classic a story as we’ll ever have and it seems timeless now, with what’s going on in our country politically, about man versus the machine and individuality versus the corporate world,” the 81-year-old says via Zoom from Santa Barbara, California.

The 1975 drama, one of the only films to ever receive the big five Oscars, remains a touchstone of American cinema with a resonant message of resisting conformity

A movie winning the big five Academy Awards – best picture along with honoring the lead actor and actress, writing and directing – happens so rarely that there’s not much use in examining the three movies that have pulled it off for common ground. But among It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Silence of the Lambs, it may be Cuckoo’s Nest, released 50 years ago on Wednesday, that feels like the unlikeliest across-the-board triumph. It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs both belong to rarely awarded genres (romantic comedy and horror, respectively), which makes their big wins unusual but also clearcut: here is an example of the best this type of movie has to offer. Cuckoo’s Nest, meanwhile, is potentially much thornier. It’s a comedy-drama made at least in part as allegory – an anti-conformity story of fomenting 1960s social rebellion, disguised as a movie about lovable patients at a mental health facility.

The Ken Kesey novel that the movie is based on was published in 1962, chronicling some of what Kesey saw as a hospital orderly and anticipating some of the coming pushback against postwar American conformity. The major change in Miloš Forman’s film is to shift the narrative away from Chief (Will Sampson), a towering Native American who presents himself as deaf and mute. Chief narrates the book, while the movie hews closer to the perspective of RP McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), who enters the facility having faked mental illness in the hopes that he can avoid serving out a prison work-camp sentence. Though the doctors don’t seem entirely convinced by his ruse, his behavior is apparently erratic enough for him to stay at least a little while. His attempts to bring more individualism and fun to his cohabitants runs afoul of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who exercises tight control over the ward.