Cool Hand Luke

Pearce, a merchant seaman who later became a counterfeiter and safe cracker, wrote the novel Cool Hand Luke about his experiences working on a chain gang while serving in a Florida prison. He sold the story to Warner Bros. for $80,000 and received another $15,000 to write the screenplay.[6] After working in television for over a decade, Rosenberg chose it to make it his directorial debut in cinema. He took the idea to Jalem Productions, owned by Jack Lemmon.[7] Since Pearce had no experience writing screenplays, his draft was reworked by Frank Pierson. Conrad Hall was hired as the cinematographer,[8] while Paul Newman's brother, Arthur, was hired as the unit production manager.[9] Newman's biographer Marie Edelman Borden wrote that the "tough, honest" script drew together threads from earlier movies, especially Hombre, Newman's earlier film of 1967.[10] Rosenberg altered the script's original ending, adding "an upbeat ending that would reprise Luke's (and Newman's) trademark smile."[11]

Paul Newman's character, Luke, is a decorated war veteran who is sentenced to serve two years in a Florida rural prison. He constantly defies the prison authorities, becoming a leader among the prisoners, as well as escaping multiple times.[12] While the script was being developed, the leading role was initially considered for Jack Lemmon or Telly Savalas. Newman asked to play the leading role after hearing about the project. To develop his character, he traveled to West Virginia, where he recorded local accents and surveyed people's behavior.[8] George Kennedy turned in an Academy Award-winning performance as Dragline, who fights Luke and comes to respect him.[13] During the nomination process, worried about the box-office success of Camelot and Bonnie and Clyde, Kennedy spent $5,000 on trade advertising to promote himself. He later said that thanks to the award, his salary was "multiplied by ten the minute [he] won", adding, "the happiest part was that I didn't have to play only villains anymore".[14]

Strother Martin, known for his appearances in westerns,[15] was cast as the Captain, a prison warden depicted as a cruel and insensitive leader, severely punishing Luke for his escapes.[16] The role of Luke's dying mother, Arletta, who visits him in prison, was passed to Jo Van Fleet after it was rejected by Bette Davis.[17] Morgan Woodward was cast as Boss Godfrey, a laconic, cruel and remorseless prison officer Woodward described as a "walking Mephistopheles".[18] He was dubbed "the man with no eyes" by the inmates for his mirrored sunglasses.[19] The blonde Joy Harmon was cast for the scene where she teases the prisoners by washing her car after her manager, Leon Lance, contacted the producers. She auditioned in front of Rosenberg and Newman wearing a bikini, without speaking.[20]

Filming began on October 3, 1966, on the San Joaquin River Delta.[9] The set, imitating a southern prison farm, was built in Stockton, California.[8] The filmmakers sent a crew to Tavares Road Prison in Tavares, Florida, where Pearce had served his time, to take photographs and measurements.[21] The structures built in Stockton included barracks, a mess hall, the warden's quarters, a guard shack and dog kennels. The trees on the set were decorated with spanish moss that the producers took to the area.[9] The construction soon attracted the attention of a county building inspector who confused it with migrant worker housing and ordered it "condemned for code violations".[8] The opening scene where Newman cuts the parking meters was filmed in Lodi, California.[9] The scene in which Luke is chased by bloodhounds and other exteriors were shot in Jacksonville, Florida, at Callahan Road Prison. Luke was played by a stunt actor, using dogs from the Florida Department of Corrections.[21]

Rosenberg wanted the cast to internalize life on a chain gang and banned the presence of wives on set. After Harmon arrived on location, she remained for two days in her hotel room, and was not seen by the rest of the cast until shooting commenced.[22] Despite Rosenberg's intentions, the scene was ultimately filmed separately.[9] Rosenberg instructed an unaware Harmon of the different movements and expressions he wanted.[22] Originally planned to be shot in half a day, Harmon's scene took three. For the part of the scene featuring the chain gang, Rosenberg substituted a teenage cheerleader, who wore an overcoat.[9]

The Academy Award-nominated original score was by Lalo Schifrin, who wrote tunes with a background in popular music and jazz.[23] Some tracks include guitars, banjos and harmonicas; others include trumpets, violins, flutes and piano.[24]

An edited version of the musical cue from the Tar Sequence (where the inmates are energetically paving the road) has been used for years as the theme music for local television stations' news programs around the world, mostly those owned and operated by ABC in the United States. Although the music was written for the film, it became more familiar for its association with TV news, in part because its staccato melody resembles the sound of a telegraph.[25]

Pierson included in his draft explicit religious symbolism.[6] The film contains several elements based on Christian themes, including the concept of Luke as a saint who wins over the crowds and is ultimately sacrificed.[26] Luke is portrayed as a "Jesus-like redeemer figure".[27] After winning the egg-eating bet, he lies exhausted on the table in the position of Jesus as depicted in his crucifixion, hands outstretched, feet folded over each other. After learning of his mother's death, Luke sings "Plastic Jesus". Greg Garrett also compares Luke to Jesus, in that like Jesus, he was not physically threatening to society because of his actions, and like Jesus' crucifixion, his punishment was "out of all proportion".[28]

Luke challenges God during the rainstorm on the road, telling him to do anything to him. Later, while he is digging and filling trenches and confronted by the guards, Tramp (Harry Dean Stanton) performs the spiritual "No Grave Gonna Keep my Body Down".[28] Toward the end of the film, Luke speaks to God, evoking the conversation between God and Jesus at the Garden of Gethsemane, depicted in the Gospel of Luke.[28] After Luke's talk, Dragline functions as a Judas, who delivers Luke to the authorities, trying to convince him to surrender.[29] In the final scene, Dragline eulogizes Luke. He explains that despite Luke's death, his actions succeeded in defeating the system.[26] The closing shot shows inmates working on crossroads from far above, such that the intersection is in the shape of the cross. Superimposed on this is the repaired photo Luke sent during his second escape, the creases of which also form a cross.[30]

Different traffic signs are used throughout the film, complementing the characters' actions. At the beginning, while Luke cuts the heads off the parking meters, the word "Violation" appears. Stop signs are also seen. Instances include the road-paving scene and the last scene, where the road meets at a cross section. Traffic lights turn from green to red in the background at the time Luke is arrested, while at the end, when he is fatally wounded, a green light in the background turns red.[31]

After beating Luke to the ground, the Captain delivers the statement. Towards the end of the movie, Luke repeats the first part of the speech.

After writing the line, Pierson worried that the phrase was too complex for the warden. To explain its origin, he created a backstory that was included in the stage directions. Pierson explained that in order to advance in the Florida prison system, officers had to take criminology and penology courses at the state university, showing how the warden might know such words.[33] Strother Martin later clarified that he felt the line was the kind that his character would very likely have heard or read from some "pointy-headed intellectuals" who had begun to infiltrate his character's world under the general rubric of a new, enlightened approach to incarceration.[34] Some authors believe that the quotation was a metaphor for the ongoing Vietnam War, which was taking place during the filming;[35] others have applied it to corporations and even teenagers.[36] The quotation was listed at number 11 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 most memorable movie lines.[37]

A sample of the line is included in the Guns N' Roses songs "Civil War" and "Madagascar".[38] Zero Mostel paraphrases the line in The Great Bank Robbery (1969). When Strother Martin hosted Saturday Night Live on April 19, 1980, he played the strict owner of a language camp for children, parodying his Cool Hand Luke role. He paraphrased his line from the movie as, "What we have here is failure to communicate BILINGUALLY!"

The review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 100% based on reviews by 53 critics, and an average of 8.8/10. Its critical consensus states, "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."[52] Empire rated it five stars out of five, declaring the movie one of Newman's best performances.[53] Slant rated the film three stars out of four. It described Newman's role as "iconic", also praising its cinematography and sound score.[54] Allmovie praised Newman's performance as "one of the most indelible anti-authoritarian heroes in movie history".[55] Roger Ebert included the film in his review collection The Great Movies, rating it four stars out of four.[19] He called it a "great" film and also an anti-establishment one during the Vietnam War. He believed 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.[56]

Newman's biographer Lawrence J. Quirk considered it one of Newman's weaker performances, writing, "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."[57] Quirk added that Newman's performance was stronger in the second half: "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".[58] Some authors have criticized the film's depiction of prison life at the time. In a review called "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", and that despite the presence of the guards, it showed that there were "worse ways to pay one's debt with society".[59] Ron Clooney also remarked that prisons "were not hotels and certainly not the stuff of Cool Hand Luke movies".[60]

In 2003, AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains rated Luke the 30th-greatest hero in American cinema,[62] and three years later, AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers: America's Most Inspiring Movies rated Cool Hand Luke number 71.[63] In 2006, Luke was ranked 53rd in Empire magazine's "The 100 Greatest Movie Characters".[64] The film solidified Newman's status as a box-office star, while the film is considered a touchstone of the era.[65] The film was an inductee of the 2005 National Film Registry list.[66]

The book was adapted into a West End play by Emma Reeves. It opened at London's Aldwych Theatre starring Marc Warren, but closed after less than two months, after poor reviews.[67] The show was chosen by The Times both as "Critic's Choice" and "What the Critics Would Pay To See".[68]

An episode of the television show The Dukes of Hazzard titled "Cool Hands Luke and Bo" was shown with Morgan Woodward playing "Colonel Cassius Claiborne" the boss of a neighboring county and warden of its prison farm. He wears the trademark shades of Boss Godfrey throughout the episode.

Nashville-based Christian alternative rock band Cool Hand Luke is named after the film.