In the 1970s, nurses in films tended to be either sex objects or harridans engendering fear, in both cases rather than caring professionals. This division also generally reflected an age difference as well, with the sex-object nurses being young and beautiful, and with older nurses presented as overbearing and unattractive. This division was and continues to be most evident in comedies, though it also seeps into more serious dramas which include nurses as well. Certainly, there are exceptions, but the fact that this has been a more apparent choice is shown in complaints by professionals that "negative stereotypes of shallow or seductive female nurses continue to be reinforced in movies and on television" (Forgacs, 1996). This sex-object nurse has a long history, appearing in the late 1950s in comedies like Operation Petticoat (1959) and emerging in even more blatant fashion in a series of nurse movies for Roger Corman beginning with The Student Nurses (1970). The alternative image of the nurse as avenging angel was most forcefully presented in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and would be given a new and horrible life in the film Misery in 1990.
The character of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nestderives from Big Nurse in the novel and the play version of the same story. McMurphy is the hero who comes up against this character. He is the free spirit who points the way for everyone else. Women are presented as cardboard characters, sexual objects or objects of fear. The women have no souls. They are either whores or beasts, and they are defined by their relationship to the males. Nurse Ratched is a parody of the idea of freedom--she often acts as if the men are free, but she does not treat them as free. Nurse Ratched is used as the annoying authority figure who spoils the men's fun and creates a threat. Moynihan (1964) in The New York Review of Books wrote about the novel and called it "a very beautif...