The film Cool Hand Luke (1967) is now 55 years old; that has no particular significance save that it’s when I finally watched it for the first time a month ago. What is more significant is that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
For those unaware, Cool Hand Luke is the tale of a man (Paul Newman) sent to a prison chain-gang in the deep South for a minor act of vandalism (chopping down parking meters, the futility of which is symbolic) and who refuses to stop rebelling against unjust authority. He eventually pays the price for it.
Given its status as an acknowledged cinematic classic, it’s downright bizarre that I had somehow avoided seeing it until now. My memories of Newman come from his youth (the hungry pool shark in The Hustler), his work alongside Robert Redford (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and The Sting), and his remarkable late-middle-age turn in The Verdict (quite simply one of the most compelling legal dramas ever filmed). And yet when you close your eyes and think of Newman, you think of Cool Hand Luke. Even I did in my mind, despite never having seen the film. It’s his classic image: impossibly bright-blue eyes, a quiet, manly, intelligently rebellious streak, and that smile. (The film knows this and leans into it so hard that there is a “cliche montage” of his smiling face from various scenes at the end of it. And because it’s Paul Newman, this works.)
Aside from Newman’s star turn, Luke benefits from inspired casting all around. It’s easy to see why Strother Martin’s performance as The Captain, Luke’s oppressor as warden of the prison, has become such an iconic portrait of evil (and not just for those of us raised on the corny Guns ‘N Roses ballad “Civil War”): It is impeccably well characterized. The acting choices Martin makes — his unique gait, his vocal inflections, the way his normally placid, considered affect curdles tighter into a brittle, panting rhythm when flustered — result in one of the starkest embodiments of the insolence of office ever put on film. When Martin delivers his famous speech declaring to the prisoners (after Luke has temporarily escaped and been recaptured) that “what we got here is failure to communicate,” his visible insecurity — enraged that he cannot command this man to obey him, enraged that Luke wields a moral authority over the prisoners that his physical authority will never approach — drips off of every quivering word he enunciates.
Beyond that, however, the cast is stocked with remarkable smaller performances: Dennis Hopper (in his pre–Easy Rider days), Harry Dean Stanton, and Joe Don Baker (the Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan in me took immediate notice) all make memorable appearances. But aside from Martin it is obviously George Kennedy, as Luke’s persecutor-turned-disciple “Dragline,” who commands attention. For a child of 1980, Kennedy is a revelation: The man I had previously associated with The Naked Gun or B-movies about genetically mutated stowaway cats here exudes hyperactive energy, transforming from jail-yard bully into awestruck friend once he finally takes Luke’s full measure in a brutal boxing match and a later game of cards (Luke displays similar qualities in both).
Cool Hand Luke is not perfect. There are clear flaws in tone and pacing. For a film that otherwise brilliantly mines the innate laconic power of Newman’s tiniest utterances and facial gestures for meaning, the segment in the middle where Luke pauses to have a long discussion with his dying mother is jarringly clumsy, a blemish on the screenplay all the more remarkable because it is both the movie’s sole misstep and, alas, also a major one. For a thuddingly literal eight minutes of soap operatics, the psychological subtlety of the film’s dominant narrative style disappears, replaced instead with a wholly unnecessary deus-ex-mamina discussion of Luke’s past that adds little to his character (except to sanctify him a bit more) and answers questions better left unresolved. We don’t need to know why this person is. We are interested in knowing who this person is.
And who he is, of course, is . . . you guessed it, Jesus. The basic Christ allegory of Cool Hand Luke is impossible to miss and fundamental to the meaning of the film: In visual iconography, thematics, and plotting, Newman’s Luke is a rebellious echo of societal impulses that were then, in late 1966, surging to the forefront of American culture. Add in a self-sacrificially Christian-themed twist to provide the moral ballast to the choices he makes and the authorities he mocks.
Yet despite occasional heavy-handedness in visual symbolism, the complexity of the screenplay is so compelling that I’ve been turning it over in my head for the past month. Luke is fascinating as a Christlike martyr. But in what is more than just a typical Christ allegory, he’s also a quasi-Greek (perhaps Shakespearean is closer to the mark) tragic archetype. His fatal flaw, his nemesis always hinted at but rarely stated directly (and thus so much more effective as characterization)? His unquenchable, almost mindless refusal to give up. To never quit, to never cease fighting back if your opponent is In The Wrong. An earlier generation reckoned with the Rebel without a Cause. Lucas Jackson was something different: The rebel with a cause. But that cause — and this is its key subversion — was the cause of rebellion itself. And it undoes him, even as it completes him.
Luke fights a losing battle, a battle he tacitly knows he will lose even before he has begun to fight it. But he doesn’t have to accept it, and therefore refuses. His final moment comes when he rises to spit Strother’s Martin’s famous “failure to communicate” speech back in his face as he waits for his death. We have never understood one another, because I cannot be broken by the likes of you. A man with nothing left to gamble on except his own sense of dignity and self-possession, he plays the one card left to him: defiance. It is a losing hand.
But then again, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.