Cool Hand Luke

I've managed to make it through 37 years thinking of COOL HAND LUKE only as "the movie where Paul Newman eats a lot of eggs." Since I'm not a particularly big fan of eggs, I never bothered to watch the picture before today.

My loss.

COOL HAND LUKE is, basically, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST on a chain gang. It's a movie about a guy who just can't conform, a guy who seems decent enough, but whose inability to work with or around authority figures fixes his fate before he ever leaves the home. This guy is an unrepentant square peg, and he's stuck in a world dedicated to grinding everyone down to the same shape.

(In my line of work, we fire guys like that as fast as possible because they're an unending stream of headaches. Yeah, yeah, you're an individual - I get it. Now can you do the job we're paying you to do?)

Thing is, I love ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, and I loved COOL HAND LUKE. In addition to spotlighting a virtuoso Newman performance, the movie gives us a real sense of time and place. From its somnolent Lalo Schiffren score to Conrad Hall's photography, we're immersed in the slow, almost eternal rythms of the rural south. The men work, and sleep, and carouse, and pass the time, and create a perfect backdrop for Newman's portrayal of a man who goes from rebel to hero to cynic. In a sense, he's doing even more than that, however. He begins the film as an emotional adolescent, progresses through manhood, and ends with the weariness of age. In the space of just a few short minutes, Newman gives us the human comedy on a chain gang. It's powerful stuff, and it's worth watching.

But I'm still not a big fan of eggs.