TAKING OFF AND CUCKOO'S NEST AT MOMA

Last Friday night, as previously mentioned, MOMA offered another of its simple but warm film tributes, this time to Milos Forman.

First up was Forman's satirical Taking Off (1971), which is scheduled to be screened again on Wednesday at 6:00 pm. Consider going.

Taking Off follows a pair of suburban parents who take off on an adventure after their daughter takes off to go on an audition. To invoke some old-fashioned lingo, it's a "counter-culture" film with a great pot-smoking sequence that I'm pretty sure I remember playing in the 1970s at "underground" or "head" or "midnight" movie theaters such as the Cine Capri in Old Bethpage and the Uniondale Mini Cinema. It probably played at one or both of New York City's Thalias, too.

Nowadays it seems that Taking Off has become something of a rarity. According to the introductory comments at MOMA, it isn't available on video. The very good print screened on Friday night was apparently retrieved from Forman's garage, prompting the MOMA curator to suggest that the garage would make a good alternative to the museum's state-of-the-art archive located somewhere far from New York City.

Taking Off was one of five low-budget films commissioned by Universal following the success of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider. The idea was to give a set of promising directors free rein and a small budget and perhaps reap similar profits. Of that group, at least three have been showcased recently at prestigious New York City venues: Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand (IMDB 6.9), Taking Off (IMDB 7.5), and Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (IMDB 7.3). The other two were Frank Perry's Diary of a Mad Housewife (IMDB 6.7) and Hopper's The Last Movie (IMDB 4.2).

A lot of talent went into the making of Taking Off. One of the writers was John Guare, who helped introduce the movie at MOMA (where I think the movie premiered). Also credited as writers are Forman, Jon Klein, and Jean-Claude Carrière, a collaborator with many directors including Luis Buñuel (who worked for a spell at MOMA). Anchored by Lynn Carlin and the terrifically droll Buck Henry with strong supporting performances from Audra Lindley, Georgia Engel, Tony Harvey, Paul Benedict, and frequent Forman collaborator Vincent Schiavelli, the cast also includes Allen Garfield, Kathy Bates, and Carly Simon, with a performance by Ike & Tina Turner—in The Catskills, I think!

Also screened at MOMA on Friday night: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is scheduled to be shown again on Saturday at 4 pm. Producer Michael Douglas (who looks and sounds more and more like his dad Kirk) gave the intro, with Forman talking about how Kirk had vainly tried to send him the Ken Kesey book in the 1960s, only to have Michael approach him about the project years later.

It was weird to see Michael Douglas and Milos Forman talking about the movie and the book so soon after I'd seen them doing the same thing in TVTV Looks at the Oscars at Anthology Film Archives. And it was weird to see Cuckoo's Nest after many, many years, and recognize Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd in what would turn out to be very atypical roles. And Jack Nicholson really does a great acting job, creating a very layered character, who is familiar but with depth and surprises.

I learned from Anne that her friend Marla hated Cuckoo's Nest as a very misogynistic story. The movie can certainly be viewed that way, though Forman made it a point to say that (for him, at least) Nurse Ratched represented the Communist censors who had kept the book from getting to him in Czechoslovakia.

Here's a different interpretation of the story.



Source (3:01)