Stuart Rosenberg (1967)
The eponymous hero has no time for Christianity but the same can’t be said for Stuart Rosenberg or the writers, Donn Pierce and Frank Pierson. After the ‘classic’ sequence in which Luke (Paul Newman) delivers on an impulsive bet to eat fifty hard boiled eggs in an hour, he lies stunned and bloated on his prison bed – in a crucifix position. Later on, he rails at the other inmates for not being able to cope without him. This is followed by a scene in which they ‘deny’ him. This famous movie, about life in a Georgia prison camp run by sadists, is mostly abominable. I’m pretty sure I’d have walked out if I’d been on my own. (The film runs 126 minutes – I was hopeful it was about to end half a dozen times before it actually did.) Is Cool Hand Luke meant to demonstrate ‘That’s life’ or ‘That’s life in American prison’? If it’s the former, Rosenberg and his writers do a poor job of suggesting any kind of existence outside the camp to substantiate their theory. If it’s the latter, we get the point within a few minutes. (The repetition that follows is probably meant to prove the film-makers’ uncompromising tough-mindedness although it seems to say more about their taste for hyperkinetic violence.)
There’s no suggestion that the staff of the prison camp might be as trapped in an institution as the criminals: the guards are just evil bastards, who might have invented the system that employs them. The prisoners have the odd fight with each other but soon jell into an essentially heartwarming (or that seems to be the idea) team to counterpoint the baddie powers-that-be. The performers – who include Dennis Hopper, Wayne Rogers, Harry Dean Stanton and Ralph Waite – register as images but Luke and Dragline (George Kennedy), the top dog among the inmates until Luke makes his presence felt, are the only ones who register as characters. The ensemble acting of the others is OK, although it is always obviously acting – especially in the prisoners’ reactions to photos of women and an especially garish bit when they ogle a girl washing a car with a very phallic hose. I didn’t get what the other prisoners were inside for but Luke is there for a very petty crime – cutting the heads off parking meters when he got drunk one night. He’s also a decorated war hero, to underline the injustice of his situation, but he’s principally an incarnation of the indomitability of the human spirit. We see it when he takes on Dragline in a fist fight and refuses to give in even when he’s vanquished and exhausted. We see it again – and again – as Luke suffers beatings meted out by the vile warden (Strother Martin) and his henchmen (who include Anthony Zerbe). Photographed by Conrad Hall, the picture has a lustrous look and an astounding palette but the effect of this – and of images of the prisoners working in a chain gang and in other carefully constructed tableaus – is too arty (and doesn’t tell you anything beyond the familiar message that the world is full of visual beauty and human viciousness).
George Kennedy, whose voice sometimes sounds as if he’s doing a Paul Robeson impression, acts his socks off as Dragline: histrionic effort is the only possible explanation for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar he received for this performance. If Luke is meant to be Everyman, Paul Newman is physically wrong for the role. His handsomeness makes Luke special too immediately – he looks several cuts above all the other prisoners. Yet Newman is a wonderfully discriminating actor, as well as a deeply sympathetic one. Considering how many opportunities he has here to go over the top, he hardly ever takes them – even if he still can’t prevent some of the scenes in question from being melodramatic. He does some amazing things. Luke’s ailing mother visits and they have a conversation with Luke standing beside her car. You know as soon as you see Newman who the woman inside the car is: his stance is the stance of a son. (How does an actor do this without moving?) Jo van Fleet, as the mother, has only this one scene but she too has a lot to do with why it’s the film’s best. In the closing stages of the fight with Dragline, Newman is remarkable as his strengthless arms shape weightless punches. In the eggs-eating sequence, he’s very funny as well as alarming. Even when, late on in the picture, Luke has a conversation with God, Newman plays it honourably and skilfully. Paul Newman was quoted in the BFI programme note as saying how much he liked the picture and the character but he’s so much better than either of them. Cool Hand Luke sometimes seems to be structured like a musical, where the numbers can cancel out the longueurs of the intervening dialogue. Newman’s big routines – the eggs, Luke’s serial escapes, and indeed the song he sings on his guitar, quietly and affectingly, after Luke’s mother dies – do a not dissimilar job here.
19 April 2010
