Cool Hand Luke
What we've got here is ... (The Bus 6.4)
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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED (1.35) 4 AUGUST 2022
The Stop
Shot on location in Stockton, California but set in the American South, Cool Hand Luke (1967) is a prison drama starring Paul Newman, George Kennedy and Strother Martin.1 Based on Donn Pearce’s 1965 novel, it is a gritty anti-establishment film made during early opposition to the Vietnam War. Consciously filled with Christian imagery,2 the film has Newman’s character defying the prison authorities, becoming a leader among the prisoners and absorbing his fellow inmates’ desires and hopes before sacrificing himself in the end.3 In 2005, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.’4
Synopsis:
Decorated WWII veteran, Lucas ‘Luke’ Jackson is arrested for drunkenly cutting the heads off parking meters and sentenced to two years’ labour on a chain gang. Arriving at the prison camp, he is confronted by strict rules, sadistic guards, and a regimentation that clashes with his spirit.
In the brutal sun, the convicts endure back-breaking physical labour. They are overseen by Boss Godfrey - the ‘man with no eyes’ who wears reflective sunglasses and never speaks - who is second only to the camp’s warden, known as the Captain. Luke’s attitude soon draws the attention of Dragline - the de facto leader of the prisoners - and conflict between the two requires him to fight Dragline in the weekly boxing match where prisoners settle grudges. The bigger Dragline physically overpowers Luke, but Luke’s refusal to surrender wins the convicts’ and Dragline’s respect. Later that evening during a poker game, Luke endears himself to the inmates by bluffing his opponent despite having a hand of ‘nothing’ - earning his prison nickname at the same time:
Dragline (laughing): Nothin'. A handful of nothin'. (To the losing, card-playing convict) You stupid mullet-head. He beat you with nothin'. Just like today when he kept comin' back at me - with nothin'.
Luke: Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real Cool Hand.
One Sunday afternoon, Luke is visited by his dying mother. Propped up in the bed of a pickup truck, Arletta tells Luke that though she still cares for him, she’s disappointed about how he turned out and feels guilty about her failure as a parent. Luke tells her she had done her best as a single mother and Arletta resigns herself to let go of him, but adds that - after her death - any inheritance will go to his more-respectable brother.
After Arletta’s visit, Luke establishes a more prominent role for himself in the camp. Dragline becomes a staunch ally and - in one of the film’s most memorable scenes - Luke wagers he can eat fifty hard-boiled eggs5 in an hour just to have ‘something to do.’ The rest of the men bet against him, but with Dragline’s support as his ‘official egg-peeler’ he wins the contest and all the money in the camp.
One day Luke learns his mother has died and the Captain orders him to be put into the ‘box’6 so he won’t try to escape to attend her funeral. Let out after her burial, Luke decides to escape anyway by sawing a hole in the wooden floor of the bunkhouse while the others distract the guards. His freedom is short-lived and he’s quickly captured and returned to the camp. The Captain, determined to break Luke ‘for his own good,’ observes - in the film’s most famous line - that Luke requires more rehabilitation:
‘What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week - which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.’
The inmates idolise Luke's escape attempt and almost immediately he escapes again. After a few days, Dragline receives an issue of Outdoor Life magazine in which a black and white picture of a well-dressed Luke and two women has been hidden. Suddenly, to their surprise the inmates turn to see a beaten and broken Luke being dragged back into the bunkhouse. Gathering around him, the prisoners ask him about the picture and Luke admits that it was fake - that he’d had it made for them.
To break his spirit, Luke is forced to repeatedly dig, fill and dig again a grave-shaped hole in front of everyone. After many hours of this labour, it appears he’s been broken - and he promises the guards he won’t try to escape again. Returning to the bunkhouse, the other prisoners abandon him because of his concession and turn away. Luke cries out at their betrayal: ‘Where are ya? Where are ya now?’7
Back on the chain gang, Luke runs errands for the guards and carries water for the other prisoners. Though the guards believe he’d been broken, Luke suddenly steals one of the trucks and - with Dragline hopping onto the running board - drives off. A fugitive once again, Luke decides to lay low and remain on his own. Dragline strikes off by himself and Luke goes into an abandoned church.
Suddenly, the police arrive: Dragline, in exchange for a promise of leniency, has revealed where Luke’s been hiding.8 He says the guards have promised not to hurt Luke - that though they’d been planning to kill him, he’d fixed it as long as Luke plays it cool. Luke opens a window, mocks the Captain and is shot in the throat by Boss Godfrey. Dragline carries the dying Luke out of the church and then attacks Godfrey, knocking off his glasses and strangling him until he’s subdued by the other guards. Against the advice of the local police, the Captain decides to take Luke to the distant prison infirmary instead of the closer local hospital. As the car leaves, Godfrey’s glasses are crushed into the mud and Luke dies in the back seat.
For the official trailer, see: Cool Hand Luke (Official Trailer)
The Detour
Today’s Detour is to an article from The Guardian investigating the bizarre, worldwide phenomenon of bicycles thrown into bodies of water. Whether it’s a lake, pond, canal or river - there’s a good chance there will be a bike somewhere in it … or, as in Amsterdam, over 15,000 (yearly)!
The Recommendation
Today’s Recommendation is the 1976 novel A Feast of Snakes, by Harry Crews.9 A warning: this novel is not for the faint-hearted - it is uncompromisingly brutal - but is nevertheless a masterpiece of southern American fiction. Extreme boredom, violence, alcoholism, sexual abuse, castration and - of course - the Rattlesnake Roundup (which is real) … let’s just say that if your images of the South come from Nicholas Sparks or Sweet Magnolias, you’ll have a very different understanding after reading Crews.
Here are two reviews:
A 1976 brief review from Time magazine: Feast of Snakes (Time)
A 2015 review from The American Scholar: Feast of Snakes (American Scholar)
The Sounds
Today’s playlist is inspired by Cool Hand Luke: ‘I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow’ by the Soggy Bottom Boys (2000), Kenny Rogers’s ‘Lucille’ (1977), a great version of ‘Plastic Jesus’ by Thomas Csorba (2020), the Grateful Dead’s classic ‘Me and My Uncle’ (1971), and - my favourite Johnny Cash cover song (it was originally written by Sting) and arguably one of his most haunting - ‘I Hung My Head’ (2002). Enjoy.
The Thought
Today’s Thought is a quote from Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880):
“People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts; no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:
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Until the next stop …
The film was nominated for four Academy Awards: Paul Newman for Best Actor, George Kennedy for Best Supporting Actor, Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson for Best Adapted Screenplay and Lalo Schifrin for Best Original Score. In the end, only Kennedy won an Oscar, though Martin’s famous line ‘what we’ve got here is failure to communicate’ ranks as number 11 in the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Film Quotes (2005).
But this is not to say it is a religious film. I first watched Cool Hand Luke as part of a university class I took on religious archetypes and though the symbolism is obvious, it doesn’t detract from the film and is really only obvious if you’re looking for it. The film’s theme - the outsider who transforms a group of followers and sacrifices himself at the end - is echoed later in the form of 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The critic Roger Ebert noted that - concerning Newman’s role - ‘rarely has an important movie star suffered more, in a film wall-to-wall with physical punishment, psychological cruelty, hopelessness and equal parts of sadism and masochism.’
Sources for today’s Stop include: Cool Hand Luke (Filmsite.org) and Cool Hand Luke (Roger Ebert).
One example of the aforementioned imagery: there are 50 eggs and 50 prisoners. Ingesting the eggs, Luke parallels the Christian belief of Christ taking upon himself the sins of the world to bring about a rebirth - eggs, Easter and the resurrection are symbolically connected. Furthermore, after his victory, Luke is stretched out on a table strewn with eggshells - the others have forgotten and abandoned him after using him for their amusement. Luke is all alone - and, in an overhead shot - is portrayed in a perfect crucifixion pose: arms outstretched, legs crossed at the ankles, eyes closed, and his head is tilted toward the left.
‘The Box’ is a small square room with limited space and air in the middle of the yard used for solitary confinement and punishment for any number of petty infractions. When the new prisoners arrive, Carl - the cigar-chomping ‘floor walker’ explains the deal (you also might recognise this speech if you’ve seen Toy Story 3): ‘Them clothes got laundry numbers on 'em. You remember your number and always wear the ones that has your number. Any man forgets his number spends the night in the box. These here spoons, you keep with ya. Any man loses his spoon spends a night in the box. There's no playin' grab-ass or fightin' in the building. You got a grudge against another man, you fight him Saturday afternoon. Any man playin' grab-ass or fightin' in the building spends a night in the box. First bell is at five minutes of eight...Last bell is at eight. Any man not in his bunk at eight spends a night in the box. There's no smokin' in the prone position in bed. If you smoke, you must have both legs over the side of your bunk. Any man caught smokin' in the prone position in bed spends the night in the box. You'll get two sheets. Every Saturday, you put the clean sheet on the top and the top sheet on the bottom. The bottom sheet you turn into the laundry boy. Any man turns in the wrong sheet spends a night in the box. No one will sit in the bunks with dirty pants on. Any man with dirty pants on sittin' on the bunks spends a night in the box. Any man don't bring back his empty pop bottle spends a night in the box. Any man loud-talkin' spends a night in the box. You got questions, you come to me...Any man don't keep order spends a night in the box.’
Hmm. Symbolism, anyone?
Yep. The Christ-figure is betrayed. Abandoned by his friends and betrayed by the one closest to him. Not exactly subtle, is it?
For more about Crews, see his obituary in The Guardian: Harry Crews Obituary (The Guardian)