The Great Movies III

The director, Stuart Rosenberg, working with the great cinematographer Conrad Hall, evokes the punishing heat of the location, where shirts stick to skin and dust sticks to everything. The prisoners cut weeds, dig ditches, and tar roads-in the road job, urged on by Luke to shove gravel on fresh oil so quickly the boss can hardly keep up. Another example of taking the moral high ground by physical travail. In the bunkhouse, Dragline, respecting Luke's stubbornness in their fight, becomes Luke's biggest admirer, and the kind of dynamic is set up that we might recognize from other prison movies; character actors (Robert Drivas, Luke Askew, Warren Finnerty, Dennis Hopper) play assigned roles in the groups that witness and admire Luke.

The movie is "crowdpleasing," says the critic Tim Dirks, and James Berardinelli speaks of such "comic" scenes as the one where Luke eats fifty hardboiled eggs. I saw the movie at the time and can testify that it is crowdpleasing, and in my review from 1967, I wrote that Luke was "always smiling, always ready for a little fun. He eats fifty hardboiled eggs on a bet and collects all the money in the camp. That Luke, he's a cool hand. "What was I thinking? Today, the egg-eating scene strikes me as all but unwatchable. The physical suffering and danger are sickening, no less so than Luke's punishment of being made to dig and fill in the same grave-shaped hole time and again. "Why did you have to say fifty eggs?" Dragline asks him. "Why not ... thirty-nine?" Well, there are fifty prisoners, of course.

When Luke collapses on a table after eating the eggs, he takes the posture of Christ on the cross. Yes, he is a Christ figure, and on the last night of the story, in a little rural church, he addresses his Father on the subject of whether he has been forsaken. Will he die for the sins of his fellow prisoners? That's making it too simple, I think, although at the end there is the curious eyewitness report by Dragline, who is already trying to recast the Gospel according to Luke to reflect a symbolic victory. Luke is shot dead by No Eyes, and looks stunned as it happens, but here is Dragline's revisionism: "He was smiling. That's right. You know, that Luke smile of his. He had it on his face right to the very end."

This and other dialogue suggests that Dragline is more than half in love with Luke, who acted out all their dreams and desires, and even turned up, improbably, with a couple of chorus girls in a magazine photo. As Dragline tells him, "Oh Luke, you wild, beautiful thing. You crazy handful of nothin'." He's right about the handful, but the first part of the description seems a strange thing for one prisoner to say about another.

Could another actor than Paul Newman have played the role and gotten away with it? Of the stars at the time, I would not be able to supply one. Warren Beatty? Steve McQueen? Lee Marvin? They would have the presence and stamina, but would have lacked the smile. The physical presence of Paul Newman is the reason this movie works: the smile, the innocent blue eyes, the lack of strutting. Look at his gentle behavior in the touching scene with his mother (Jo Van Fleet), a scene that evokes the scene with Bonnie's mother in Bonnie and Clyde. Both parents and both children know they will never see each other again, and in a way are apologizing. Newman as a star had a powerful unforced charisma: we liked him. Could Kennedy have described Lee Marvin as "you wild, beautiful thing"?

Much was also made in 1967 of the movie as an "anti-establishment" statement. The year 1967 was at the center of the Vietnam era, and Luke was against the establishment, but I cannot rebuild the period in my memory to make Cool Hand Luke work as a statement about Vietnam. Strother Martin as LBJ? But my mind returns to the symbolism of Boss Godfrey, the man with the mirroring sunglasses who never speaks. He reminds me of another famous pair of glasses in fiction. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the road into town passes through an industrial wasteland overseen by a gigantic billboard of never-blinking yellow eyeglasses, through which stare the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. Some see Eckleburg's eyes as the eyes of God. I don't know. I know that Luke calls out to God at the end: "It's beginnin to look like you got things fixed so I cant never win out. Inside, outside, all them rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am. Just where am I supposed to fit in? 01' Man, I gotta tell ya. I started out pretty strong and fast. But it's beginnin'to get to me. When does it end?"