Cool Hand Luke - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Yeah, well...

Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand."

~(Luke)~

"Oh, Luke.  

He was some boy.

Cool Hand Luke, hell!

He's a natural born world-shaker!"

~(Dragline)~

Cool Hand Luke - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 American prison drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg and starring Paul Newman.

Newman stars in the title role as Luke, a prisoner in a Florida prison camp who refuses to submit to the system. In 2005, the United States Library of Congress deemed Cool Hand Luke to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The film contains some scenes with Christian themes, including an exhausted Luke lying in a Christ-like pose after winning the egg-eating bet, and the final cross-roads shot with the repaired photo of Luke and the two women superimposed.

Upon its initial release, Bosley Crowther wrote an NYT Critic's Pick review, saying "what elevates this brutal picture above the ruck of prison films and into the range of intelligent contemplation of the ironies of life is a sharp script by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson, ruthlessly realistic and plausible staging and directing by a new man, Stuart Rosenberg, and splendid acting by Paul Newman and a totally unfaultable cast"; besides Newman, Crowther commended Kennedy's "powerfully obsessive" depiction of the "top-dog who handles things his way as effectively and finally as destructively as does the warden or the guards" and Jo Van Fleet, "who, in one scene, in which she comes to visit him propped up in the back of a truck, does as much to make us comprehend the background and the emotional hang-up of the loner as might have been done in the entire length of a good film." Variety magazine said the "versatile and competent cast maintains interest throughout rambling exposition to a downbeat climax."

The Toronto Star, in a 2007 home video review, said the film's anti-establishment message fit well with the mood of the 1960s. All of the forty-four reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a positive review, generating a 100% 'Fresh' rating.

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. And I don't like it any more than you men.

The line is frequently taken as "What we've got here is a failure to communicate." Both are correct. This line is heard twice in the film, first in its entirety, with no "a", by the Captain (Strother Martin), and later on the first line with an "a", said by Luke. In the "making of" feature on the Blu-ray disc, Frank Pierson, the screenplay's co-writer, says that the line "just appeared" on the page as he was typing (that is, it was the result of his subconscious thought). After some debate over whether it was "too intellectual" a remark for the Captain, it was retained.

Strother Martin himself recalled in the book, Films of the Sixties, that he felt the line was one which his character, would very likely have heard or read, from some "pointy-headed intellectuals" that had begun to infiltrate his character's world in the 1960s, under the general rubric of a new, enlightened, approach to incarceration.

The quote was listed at #11 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 most memorable movie lines.