Cool Hand Luke

This is Paul Newman’s career performance and the one that should have awarded him the Oscar for Best Actor – not that other role in The Color of Money, which was a ‘we forgot about you’ Oscar. The physical punishment that Newman endured during the filming of Cool Hand Luke, combined with his stellar acting is the reason why this is his shining moment as a film actor. You become so enamored with his performance that when he endures so much physical punishment, you want him to continue to try and escape the prison, not matter how many times he fails. I’ve heard many critics call Newman’s Luke the anti-hero. He is in fact a hero. Just because the circumstances surrounding the character’s incarceration are based on unlawful activities doesn’t mean that the character automatically becomes the anti-hero. Luke is a heroic character because Newman’s performance makes him so. In the hands of another actor, this would not be the case.

There are some wonderful iconic things about this movie besides Newman’s performance. Strother Martin’s “What we’ve got here is… failure to communicate” is one of the great movie lines in history. The fact that is comes from the lips of a surprisingly warm, yet sadistic prison warden shows the kind of depth that this film has. Also, the guard who wears the mirror sunglasses known as Boss has been imitated and caricatured for years (especially on The Simpsons: “No talking. No Listening. Do you hear me?”) The egg-eating scene is particularly unpleasant to watch but no more less iconic than the famous line and the characters themselves.

George Kennedy gives a wonderful performance as Luke’s rival, then as his confidante. Starting out as this big, mean leader of the prison, he submits to the ultimate will of Luke and relies on him to get the inmates through their hellish situation as an example of how to never give up. There is just the right amount of dust, heat, dirt, sweat and humidity to let the audience really feel the effect all of this had on the prisoners. It’s one of the most powerful non-human characters in the film.

This was one of the great films of the late 1960s, but I can see it just as clearly being made in the era of all those great anti-establishment films of the early to mid-1970s like Dog Day Afternoon where the cinematography and setting play a crucial role in the film. Cool Hand Luke is one of these great films.