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The harsh landscape of Cool Hand Luke works effectively to show us the psychological state of the characters. There is something almost Biblical, or, at the very least, Shakespearean, about Luke’s wanderings and sufferings, his willingness to damn it all and doom himself to martyrdom. From the very first scenes of his drunkenly destroying public property, for what purpose? even he can’t say, to the final scenes of his tormented and pleading cries to be left alone in the chuch, Cool Hand Luke is a great film that shows us someone who so totally inhabits the anti-hero persona that we, much like the characters, begin to idolize and martyr him before all is said and done.
Only Paul Newman could have ever played this role. Yes, he was a great movie star. But he was so effortless and wonderfully present as an actor. He was not a showboat Method actor like, say, Marlon Brando in some of his clumsier movies like Sayonara. He was an interior actor. By seeming to do very little on the outside, he was actually doing a lot on the inside. I can pinpoint in the film when Luke changes tracks from good-natured rabble rouser to Messiac anti-hero driven to his own destruction by his sense of purpose. What is this scene I speak of? The quiet and tender scene between Luke and his dying mother (Jo Van Fleet), in which Newman reveals to us a lot of his character’s angst, genteel nature and that smile of his. That winkle in his perfectly colored blue eyes. Luke wasn’t the only cool hand, Newman’s tremendous gifts make this movie great. Any other actor in the role and it wouldn’t have worked. I still don’t grasp how Newman won his Oscar for The Color of Money and not for this. Ration that one up to an apologia Oscar.
It’s not totally Newman’s one-man-show that makes the movie work. The performances of the inmates do their fair share. Especially George Kennedy as Dragline, the biggest, baddest man in the camp who’s vaguely-homosexual leanings for Luke helps to continue his myth, Dragline's gospel throughout the film. Jo Van Fleet has one scene, but her performance and that scene stick with you after the end. Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton also spring to my mind in small roles as inmates. Hopper being a simpleton and Stanton being another bruised and brooding inmate.
And yet, I haven’t described much in the way of plot. I feel like everyone knows the basic storyline for Cool Hand Luke. Luke drunkenly cuts off the tops of parking meters, gets sent to a prison work camp, meets the 50 other inmates and becomes their mythological hero. Luke constantly takes beatings from others – inmates and guards have their shot at him, so do the elements – but gets up each and every time. He is charming and damned with something hanging over his head. It is no wonder that they’ve placed their hopes and dreams upon him, that they have chosen him to idolize. Yet I always knew Luke was damned. No character this charming, handsome and possessed with a cause could possibly make it out of this world alive.
