"Cool Hand Luke" is a perfect film. Just two days before the great, irreplaceable Paul Newman died, I got the itch to watch this 1967 stick-it-to-the-man prison drama from 1967. I just sat in awe of his power.
Newman's Luke is, of course, a regular joe, or Luke, sentenced to a prison chain gang for lobbing off the heads of parking meters while drunk. In prison, the war hero and absolute rebel bucks authority and becomes a quasi-Christ figure to his fellow inmates.
The name Luke is no mistake, even an agnostic, as I am, knows the themes here. But I digress.
Luke escapes again and again from the prison, eats 50 boiled eggs and leads his crew in a race to quickly finish paving a road to let the "road bosses" know who runs the show. And like Christ, Luke suffers for his transgressions.
George Kennedy, who won an Oscar here, plays Dragline, a John the Baptist and unintentional Judas Iscariot. He gives a performance that makes you hate him, them fall deeply, hopelessly, in pity with him. Not love. But pity. And forgiveness.
Such a Christ-like story, film, is it not?
I could go into the mechanics of this being a film about the unbeatable human spirit in the face of oppression, and the religious overtones (which I always found over the top), but that's par for the course for these (those) times. Newman is what I truly love about this film.
The man was a god, and he's never been better than here. God.
One of my all-time favorite movie scenes: Luke learns his mother has died as he sits in the prison camp mess hall, and he quietly picks up a guitar, goes to his bunk and sings a song aloud to himself as he weeps. The scene is perfect. Literally perfect. My heart breaks for my own mother watching that.
The acting is unmatched, as tears stroll down his cheeks. Add in his final scene, where Luke throws back the "What we have here..." line from the wickedly good Strother Martin at his captors, Newman again is perfection. A+
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