The story
Cool Hand Luke was released in the United States in November 1967. It was directed by Stuart Rosenberg and based on a 1965 novel by Donn Pearce, who had himself served time on a Florida road gang. Paul Newman plays Luke Jackson, a veteran who is sent to a Southern prison camp after a minor offence, reportedly for cutting the heads off parking meters while drunk. Once there, he refuses to accept the camp’s rules or the authority of the guards. His stubbornness, humour and repeated escape attempts make him a hero to the other prisoners.
The tone mixes comedy with bleakness. The labour is exhausting, the punishments are harsh, and the guards hide behind mirrored sunglasses, which keeps them faceless. The film is not a documentary about prison conditions, but its picture of arbitrary institutional authority fitted a period when many Americans were questioning rules and authority of all kinds.
Famous scenes
Several moments from the film became part of popular memory:
- The egg-eating bet. Luke bets fellow prisoners that he can eat fifty hard-boiled eggs in an hour. The scene is played for laughs and then becomes a near-religious image of sacrifice, with Luke sprawled on the table afterwards.
- The car wash. A scene in which a young woman washes a car while the chain gang watches became one of the most talked-about sequences of the year, and it is often cited as an example of the frankness creeping into mainstream film.
- “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” The line is spoken by Strother Martin as the prison captain, shortly after he has had Luke beaten. It is often quoted, and it was used again in later songs and films.
- The hole. Luke’s time in the punishment box, and his later attempts to escape, form the film’s darker passages.
The score was composed by Lalo Schifrin, and the film’s music is recognisable for its restrained guitar-led feel, which suits the setting.
Newman’s career
By 1967 Paul Newman was already established as a major star. He had been nominated for an Academy Award for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and he had played the pool hustler in The Hustler (1961) and the rancher’s son in Hud (1963). In 1966 he had starred in the detective film Harper. Cool Hand Luke gave him a part that mixed his charm with defiance, and many regard it as one of his defining roles.
Newman was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for the film in April 1968, though the award went to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night. He would not win an Academy Award for acting until The Color of Money in 1986. In the late 1960s he was also beginning to direct, with Rachel, Rachel following in 1968, and his work with Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973) lay ahead.
George Kennedy and the supporting cast
The actor who did win an Oscar from the film was George Kennedy, who took Best Supporting Actor for playing Dragline, the prisoner who first challenges Luke and then becomes his closest friend. The cast also included Strother Martin, Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton in smaller roles, several of whom would be better known in later years. The ensemble gives the camp a believable sense of community.
Themes and reading
The film is open to several readings. Some see Luke as a rebel against conformity, an anti-establishment hero whose popularity came as the American counterculture was growing. The Southern setting also evoked the region at the centre of the civil rights movement, though the film is not about race. Others notice the religious imagery: the egg scene resembles a crucifixion pose, Luke prays in a storm, and he is referred to as a kind of saviour by the men. The filmmakers were not necessarily pushing one meaning, and the film has remained interesting because it supports more than one.
It is also worth noting that the film does not make Luke’s rebellion consequence-free. Each act of defiance costs him, and the ending is bitter. This ambiguity separates it from simple celebrations of rebellion.
Place in 1967
Among the 1967 movies that critics now group under New Hollywood, alongside Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, the film fits a pattern of stories about outsiders who resist institutions. Unlike those two, it did not become a symbol of generational conflict, but it was respected, popular and long remembered. Viewers continue to watch it for Newman’s performance and for the scenes that have become shorthand for the period.