Reconstituting the solitary antihero of the chain-gang picture for the late 1960s, Cool Hand Luke gave Paul Newman his third iconic role of the decade (following The Hustler and Hud) and a figure he embodies less as a movie star than as a redeemer. Newman’s beauty and post-Method charisma is in the service of a tailor-made scenario (adapted by Donn Pearce from his autobiographical novel of the same name, with Frank R. Pierson): Lucas “Luke” Jackson, a decorated war hero busted for drunkenly decapitating small-town parking meters, evolves from laconic, detached enigma to a doomed individualist fighting the Man’s oppression on behalf of his fellow sinners.
Forged into a symbol by his captors’ cruelty, failed escape attempts, and the eventual idolatry of his comrades, Luke is the road-gang prisoner as incarcerated messiah. No wonder he converts bunkhouse alpha-dog Clarence “Dragline” Slidell (a burly George Kennedy, in an Oscar-winning performance) from a foe who beats Luke bloody in a Pyrrhic grudge fight to a worshipful ally who enthuses over him as “my baby” and “you wild, beautiful thing.”
Making his feature debut, veteran TV director Stuart Rosenberg made his shrewdest gambit in surrounding his lead with a cacophonous, widescreen-stuffing gang of character actors who, inhabiting every type from compulsive bettor to bloodhound wrangler, crowd into the frame with gusto to form a Hawksian community. (Among the soon-to-bes in Luke’s road gang are Dennis Hopper, Anthony Zerbe, Wayne Rogers, Ralph Waite, and a guitar-strumming Harry Dean Stanton.) While the convicts’ bunkhouse hardly looks oppressively claustrophobic, hanging bare bulbs and chicken-wire gates notwithstanding, the repetitive early-morning scenes of their weed-whacking roadside labor under rifle-cocking guards bind them as an emasculated tribe in need of the spiritual liberation Luke, incrementally drawn into becoming their champion, makes graspable for the gang and intolerably threatening to the Law.
Countering the 1930s social critique of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang with the updated one-against-the-world zeitgeist of its era, Cool Hand Luke makes the naked power of what Luke’s fighting an abstraction: the mirrored shades of a silent guard called the Man With No Eyes (Morgan Woodward), an expert shot who frequently exchanges his cane for a rifle. But that instinct for the abstract (echoed in theaters a few years later by Milos Forman’s thematically and structurally similar One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) nearly undoes the picture.
Rosenberg overloads the film with Christ-like iconography, most egregiously at the end of the boisterous sequence where Luke attempts to eat 50 hard-boiled eggs to win a bet. After the cash pot has been raucously divided, an overhead shot finds Newman clad in his underwear, spread on a tabletop in a cruciform pose. Such lunges for sanctimony and significance undermine the grit and vernacular naturalism that the script occasionally supplies, most indelibly when the reedy-voiced Captain (Strother Martin), after knocking the recaptured Luke on the head, proclaims, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” (Newman repeating the line at the film’s climax—when he’s cornered, inevitably, in a church—is mere dilution.)
Newman remains watchable and glamorous throughout—bloody, muddy or coated in torso-flattering sweat—but Cool Hand Luke’s efforts to sentimentally “humanize” him by psychological revelation are clumsy. In a lengthy scene as Luke’s dying mother, smoking and propped up in a flatbed truck for a final visit, Jo Van Fleet is valiant but can’t lift the stilted dialogue (“Sometimes I wished people was like dogs”) into reality.
While Conrad Hall’s magic-hour cinematography prettifies the road gang’s day into painterly landscapes, and Lalo Schifrin’s dynamic, versatile score lionizes the surge of humanity the prisoners feel when Luke goads them into double-timing a hellish road-tarring job, the film’s scenario works best in its anecdote-like set pieces, whether ritually cruel or brazenly tinged with burlesque, as when a buxom girl cockteases the prisoners by humping the car she’s washing.
The film’s apparently tacked-on studio ending attempts to dispel downbeat martyrdom with Hollywood sunniness by presenting a montage of Newman smiling. To reverse Martin Scorsese’s joke about his parish priest’s reaction to his filmmaking, Cool Hand Luke’s showbiz gloss is too dressed up for Easter Sunday to make Good Friday as punishing as it needs to be.
Image/Sound
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment’s 4K transfer improves on their 2008 home video release in every way, from the film’s more vibrant yet realistic color balancing to the incredibly rich detail that captures every speck of blood, sweat, and tears on the various inmates’ faces. Grain is tight and even and, aside from the occasional early morning or magic hour shot that leans a bit much toward teal, it’s hard to imagine the film looking much better. There’s no 5.1 audio track, but the stereo audio is pretty robust, allowing the clanking of chains, smacking of boxing gloves, and gurgling of an egg-stuffed stomach to come through loud and clear.
Extras
The extras here have been ported over from Warner’s prior release of the film and are included on both the 4K and Blu-ray discs. Paul Newman biographer Eric Lax provides the audio commentary, and his discussion of Newman’s career and performances is unsurprisingly well-researched, as is his analysis of the similarities and differences between Donn Pierce’s novel and the film. Still, he spends more than ample time delving into the backgrounds and careers of virtually everyone in the cast, and at the expense of further analysis of the film itself. The other extra, the 30-minute Making Cool Hand Luke, is part fan service, with several actors waxing rhapsodic about how well everyone got along on set and how great of a guy Newman was, and part sincere discussion of the casting and production process.
Overall
Warner Bros.’s 4K UHD Blu-ray release serves up nothing new in terms of extras, but the A/V presentation is strong enough to remind you that sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.
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Strother actually says “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” and Newman phrases it like you have listed above. A very minor difference. Really enjoyed your review.