THE CLASSIC FILM DVD "COOL HAND LUKE": A REVIEW W

COOLHANDLUKE
Directed By: Stuart Rosenberg Written By: Donn Pearce, Frank Pierson Starring: Paul Newman, George Kennedy,
Strother Martin, Harry Dean Stanton, Jo Van Fleet, Luke Askew, Dennis Hopper Academy Awards: George Kennedy – Best Supporting Actor
Release date: I967

Heroes, those beloved of the Gods, defeat evil and get the girl. We want to see ourselves in those characters, winning our struggles, securing our loves. But when that gets stale, then it's time for a film about fortune’s orphan, the seeming loser - Cool Hand Luke. Although he's a nobody, the film is heavy with symbolism that's borrowed from many places. That Cool Hand contains the first two letters in the words "charisma" or a certain Biblical personage could mean something - or not.

To really understand the film, you have to understand America in I967-68; a nation being torn apart by the generational divide, war, race riots, and assassinations. Cries of "Don't trust anyone over thirty", and "America - love it or leave it", were being shouted with abandon. Posters of Che and Mao, Marx and Lenin were on many a college student's dorm walls. If students were ready to idolize those historical leaders, then a film on the roots of leadership and authenticity was in order.

The location is a Southern prison camp during the late-I940s. A man named Luke (Paul Newman) has been convicted of damaging city property by knocking the heads off parking meters, signaling rather literally the theme; "Don't follow leaders, watch the parkin' meters", from Bob Dylan's, Subterranean Homesick Blues song of I965. Luke duly gets two years on the prison chain-gang with the likes of Dragline (George Kennedy), Harry Dean Stanton and Dennis Hopper.

He's first beaten for being uppity, but shortly graduates to high esteem in the men's eyes by winning at poker, thus the nickname. He performs other wonders, including eating fifty eggs to win a pool, fifty also being the number of prisoners in the unit. Soon they’re following him around like a messiah, but he's thinking about number one, so he keeps escaping. Unfortunately he also keeps getting caught, and the film swaps hilarity for deadly seriousness in the blink of an eye. The cap’n (Strother Martin) and the prison bosses ain't laughin'; they have him dig and refill holes (the size of a grave) in the yard till he drops. Any similarity between that activity and most people's jobs is purely coincidental. They got one thing right: You need to laugh at the bosses jokes; they don't need to laugh at yours.

Cool Hand seems a broken man; his followers desert him in an instant; and if the film had been realistic it would have ended there. But we’re dealing with myth; so he escapes again. The men once again see his heroic qualities, Dragline escapes with him, having seen that Luke must have been playing possum. Luke seems curiously indifferent to the power he has over the men, but the prison bosses see it; and they're not pleased. As in the larger society, nonconformism is only allowed to a degree, then things get grim. Holed-up in an abandoned church, Gethsemane-like, Luke asks God what He has in mind for his life; he himself having no idea. His answer is not long in coming. In the meantime Dragline, having first acted as Judas, is already polishing the myth of the Cool Hand.

The film is close to the feeling of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (I975); for a while Newman and Brando and Nicholson were having a contest over who could get beaten the most in a movie. But Cuckoo's Nest was the film that was passed around again and again in countries behind the Iron Curtain; the difference being, (besides the personal VCR having been invented in the meantime), that in Cuckoo's Nest movie myths were being sold, not examined; but if you were behind the Iron Curtain myth's what you needed to keep going.

That we want to identify with born losers like Luke and McMurphy and see them as heros is pathetic; but our spiritual thirst is great, and they have that thing we all wish we had - charisma. That such people can turn on us after we've put them on a pedestal was examined in the film A Face in the Crowd (I957). In political life such people are question marks; after they're given power, will they be great leaders - or the opposite? And our compulsive need for leaders at is in part a reflection of our own childishness. That most people given the slightest power over others soon abuse it has always been a considerable problem. The millions of slaughtered in the twentieth century suggest the question is an important one.

Cool Hand Luke simplifies situations and characters to achieve maximum effect. It's definitely trying to work on many levels, but is enjoyable as a good action movie. The final minutes might be difficult for some. The tag line given to the cap'n' of “What we’ve got here is . . . 'failure to communicate'", was a line grabbed from a sociology-speak interpretation of the problems of the 60s. A series of films by Michelangelo Antonioni about non-communication might have been another source. Put in the mouth of a cracker Southern prison warden, the phrase doesn't work - the character could never say something like that - but the director probably liked the dissonance. And it's the line that's always remembered. But the point of the film is summarized in the faked photo that Cool Hand sends the boys during one of his escapes, and which appears as the last image in the film.

Scenes from the movie: "Failure to Communicate" --- The Cool Poker Hand --- I Can Eat 50 Eggs --- First Day in Camp

© Features-on-Film Inc.