"What we've got here is failure to communicate."
On the chain gang, they'd seen every kind of man...but Luke became a legend.
Sometimes, "Nothing" can be a really Cool Hand.

No one can eat fifty eggs.

The man...and the motion picture that simply do not conform.

He was a cool customer. . .until the law made it hot for him!


Paul Newman was nominated for an Oscar and George Kennedy received one for his work in this allegorical prison drama. Luke Jackson (Paul Newman) is sentenced to a stretch on a southern chain gang after he's arrested for drunkenly decapitating parking meters. While the avowed ambition of the captain (Strother Martin) is for each prisoner to "get their mind right," it soon becomes obvious that Luke is not about to kowtow to anybody. When challenged to a fistfight by fellow inmate Dragline (George Kennedy), Luke simply refuses to give up, even though he's brutally beaten. Luke knows how to win at poker, even with bad cards, by using his smarts and playing it cool. Luke also figures out a way for the men to get their work done in half the usual time, giving them the afternoon off. Finally, when Luke finds out his mother has died, he plots his escape; when he's caught, he simply escapes again. Soon, Luke becomes a symbol of hope and resilience to the other men in the prison camp -- and a symbol of rebelliousness that must be stamped out to the guards and the captain. Along with stellar performances by Newman, Kennedy, and Martin, Cool Hand Luke features a superb supporting cast, including Ralph Waite, Harry Dean Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Wayne Rogers, and Joe Don Baker as members of the chain gang. ~

Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 American prison drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg, starring Paul Newman and featuring George Kennedy in an Oscar-winning performance. Newman stars in the title role as Luke, a prisoner in a Florida prison camp who refuses to submit to the system.

The film, set in the 1940s, is based on Donn Pearce's 1965 novel of the same name. Pearce sold the story to Warner Brothers, who then hired him to write the script. Due to Pearce's lack of film experience, the studio added Frank Pierson to rework the screenplay. Newman's biographer Marie Edelman Borden states that the "tough, honest" script drew together threads from earlier movies, especially Hombre, Newman's earlier film of 1967. The film has been cited by Roger Ebert as an anti-establishment film which was shot during the time of the Vietnam War, in which Newman's character endures "physical punishment, psychological cruelty, hopelessness and equal parts of sadism and masochism". His influence on his prison mates and the torture that he endures is compared to that of Jesus, and Christian symbolism is used throughout the film, culminating in a photograph superimposed over crossroads at the end of the film in comparison to the crucifixion. Filming took place on the San Joaquin River Delta, and the set, imitating a southern prison farm, was built in Stockton, California. The filmmakers sent a crew to Tavares Road Prison in Tavares, Florida to take photographs and measurements.

Upon its release, Cool Hand Luke received favorable reviews and became a box-office success. The film cemented Newman's status as one of the era's top box-office actors, while the film was described as the "touchstone of an era". Newman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, George Kennedy won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, Pearce and Pierson were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the score by Lalo Schifrin was also nominated for the Best Original Score. In 2005, the United States Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry, considering it to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It currently has a rare 100% rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The quote used by the prison warden in the film, which begins with "What we've got here is failure to communicate", was listed at #11 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 most memorable movie lines.

Cool Hand Luke opened on November 1, 1967 at Loew's State Theatre in New York City. The proceeds of the premiere went to charities.[35] The film became a box-office success,[36] grossing US$16,217,773 in domestic screenings.[37] Kennedy won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Newman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, while Pearce and Pierson were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and Schiffrin was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score.[38]

Rosenberg was nominated for best director by the Writers Guild of America and Conrad Hall was nominated for best cinematography by the National Society of Film Critics.

Variety described Newman's performance as "excellent", noting the supporting cast as "versatile and competent".[39] The New York Times praised the film, remarking that Pearce and Pierson's "sharp script", Rosenberg's "ruthlessly realistic and plausible" staging and direction and Newman's "splendid" performance with an "unfaultable" cast, "elevates" it among other prison films.[40] On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an overall 100% "Certified Fresh" approval rating based on 45 reviews, with an average of 8.8 out of 10. The site's consensus is that "Though hampered by Stuart Rosenberg's direction, Cool Hand Luke is held aloft by a stellar script and one of Paul Newman's most indelible performances".[41] Empire rated it five stars out of five, declaring the movie one of Newman's best performances.[42] Slant rated the film three stars out of four. It described Newman's role as "iconic", also praising its cinematography and sound score.[43] Allmovie praised Newman's performance as "one of the most indelible anti-authoritarian heroes in movie history".[44]



The Paul Newman smile, the reason why the movie works according to Roger Ebert
Critic Roger Ebert included the film in his review collection The Great Movies, rating it four stars out of four.[15] Ebert stated that it was a "great" film and also an anti-establishment one during the time of the Vietnam War. He believed that the film was a product of its time and that no major film company would be interested in producing a film of such "physical punishment, psychological cruelty, hopelessness and equal parts of sadism and masochism" today. He praised the cinematography, capturing the "punishing heat" of the location, and stated that "the physical presence of Paul Newman is the reason this movie works: The smile, the innocent blue eyes, the lack of strutting", which no other actor could have produced as effectively.[45]

Contrary to the general consensus, Newman's biographer Lawrence J. Quirk thought that it was one of Newman's weaker performances, stating "For once, even Newman's famed charisma fails him, for in Cool Hand Luke he completely lacks the charm that, say, Al Pacino in Scarecrow effortlessly exhibits when he plays a screw-up who also winds up (briefly) incarcerated."[46] However, Quirk added that Newman's performance was stronger in the second half and said that "to be fair to Newman, he was trying his damnedest to play an impossible part, since Luke is a convict's rationalization fantasy and never a real character."[47] Some authors have criticized the film's depiction of prison life at the time. In a review entitled "Sheer Beauty in the Wrong Place", Life, while praising the film's photography, criticized the influence of the visual styles in the depictions of the prison camp. The magazine declared that the landscapes turned it into "a rest camp (in which) the men are getting plenty of sleep, food and healthy outdoor exercise", that despite the presence of the guards showed that there were "worse ways to pay one's debt with society".[48] Ron Clooney also remarked that prisons "were not hotels and certainly not the stuff of Cool Hand Luke movies".[49]