Review of Cool Hand Luke (1967) by Nick O — 03 May 2011

There was a time in culture of those so notably defined American photoplays where Paul Newman toyed onscreen just as smooth he could melt unisex hearts. Some might even say he'd bat his starry eyes mnemonic to that of a dollhouse nation, a Depression-era man whose easy charm tricked the cosmos into dumping him off a few 30 years in the future, and his trademark smirks suggest intermittently naivety on the surface and deeper and darker the know-how which comes with scared reminiscence of a white collar yesteryear.

Then again, it's also pretty ironic a movie like "Cool Hand Luke" should choose to invoke in Newman a character never seemingly looped as to where the camera's stalking about, when you'd imagine in the film's near context of substituting style for realism at least some presence would too often be making claim. "Cool Hand Luke" doesn't walk that line. Think of movies that also abandoned said platform, like "Taxi Driver" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", wherein fully-realized paradigms blanketed any sense of fictional reality by planting a simple face center stage and having him dance, just because he loves the attention.

In "Cool Hand Luke" Newman plays Luke Jackson, a man unexplainably pushed so far as to steal change from grocery store parking meters. He's given the boot nonetheless to a chain gang in the otherworldly south, quickly makes nice with Dragline (George Kennedy), and pulls comic and probably consciously disturbing gags to settle similar ground with the remaining inmates. The movie from there goes through the regular tropes: breakout, capture, reconcile; wash, rinse and repeat. What's so amazing, then? Try an acting bonanza, from Kennedy, to Morgan Woodward as the warden folk call "Boss" and Strother Martin as shuttle captain, and come back around to Newman as that self-described martyr. He pushes when the sign reads "pull", laughs with tears, and does it all with a quiet human fear that lights director Stuart Rosenberg's allegorical fire. Read it as art house nirvana or senior fare. You'll be floored either way.