A laid-back Southern man is sentenced to two years in a rural prison but refuses to conform.
I had never seen “Cool Hand Luke” before now. I know – what the hell have I been doing? Well, as I learned with “The Great Escape” and other overrated films of the time, it does not age well. With a too laid-back delivery, “Cool Hand Luke” is pretty boring until the last 20 minutes or so.
Set in 1948, in Northern Florida, Luke (Paul Newman at the peak of his good looks) is arrested for decapitating parking meters and public drunkenness. Luke is a pacifistic rebel framed in a Christ-like role, but mainly he is a man with a tendency for self-punishment. After WWII, he was a decorated sergeant before being busted back down to Private. But he does not care. A judge sentences Luke to two years of hard labor for his destruction of public property.
In the balmy Florida heat, Luke and his fellow prisoners are subjected to brutal labor, tarring roads for the county and navigating the prison’s Kafkaesque rules. Rules that, if broken, will lead to The Box. The Box is a claustrophobic metallic container for an unlucky prisoner to stay in since it becomes unbearably hot under the scorching sun.
For making an award-winning film, I was surprised to see that its director, Stuart Rosenberg, had not made anything memorable besides “The Pope of Greenwich Village.” In “Cool Hand Luke,” cinematographer Conrad Hall uses the Floridian landscape, but the pair make odd framing choices. One choice that irked me was when Harry Dean Stanton was singing “A closer walk with thee” by Patsy Cline, and the camera grossly zoomed in on Stanton’s mouth and fingers strumming. Don Siegel, who made the superior “Riot In Cell Block 11,” captured prison life with much more naturalistic immediacy.
The screenplay was adapted by the novel’s author, Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson (“Dog Day Afternoon”). Pearce was inspired to write the book after serving two weeks on a chain gang for safecracking. Maybe Luke would have been cooler if he was a safecracker.
Thankfully, the Chain Gang is full of exciting characters. Particularly Dragline (George Kennedy’s Oscar-winning turn), the prison’s alpha male with plenty of funny lines. Harry Dean Stanton and Dennis Hopper play minor speaking roles, but each gets a fair amount of screen time. I am sure this is the youngest I have seen Stanton, who still looks like an old man chiseled from Mt Rushmore. Interestingly, he also taught Newman to play “Plastic Jesus” for the important scene. Also, the authority figures like the intimidating Boss Man (Morgan Woodward) and another played by veteran character actor Clifton James Carr are pretty memorable.
It was interesting to notice that Newman’s body was the ultimate physique for men at the time. This was a time that was before steroids were in vogue in Hollywood. Today there is always some divine transformation (i.e., Chris Pratt) that no doubt the use of steroids while packaged in Men’s Health as “diet and exercise.”
The film’s restoration makes the greens of farm fields and the blues of prison uniforms pop onscreen. But “Cool Hand Luke” feels like more style over substance. For example, when Luke is returned from one of his many escapes, his re-entry is nicely shot, but his lack of caring makes me not care. It lacks depth and ultimately withholds dramatic impact. I adore Paul Newman, but his filmography is inconsistent upon further scrutiny. Composer Lalo Schifrin, who created the “Mission Impossible” theme song, has an inconsistent score that is most annoying and partially good here.
As the great filmmaker William Friedkin mentioned in multiple interviews, you need to give a film 50 or more years until you can properly gauge whether it is, in reality, a great film. While I am sure I would have loved this film when it was released, as of right now, it does not stand the test of time.
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