Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 American prison drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg,[3] starring Paul Newman and featuring George Kennedy in an Oscar-winning performance.

Roger Ebert called Cool Hand Luke an anti-establishment film shot during emerging popular opposition to the Vietnam War.

In early 1950s Florida, decorated World War II veteran Lucas "Luke" Jackson drunkenly beheads several parking meters.

He is sentenced to two years on a chain gang in a prison camp run by the Captain, a stern warden, and Walking Boss Godfrey, a quiet rifleman nicknamed "the man with no eyes" because he always wears mirrored sunglasses.

Luke's struggle for supremacy peaks when he leads a work crew in a seemingly impossible but successful effort to complete a road-paving job in less than a day.

At first, the other prisoners are angry, but when Luke returns after a long stay in the box and is punished by being forced to eat a massive serving of rice, the others help him finish it.

For his escape, the guards brutalize Luke to the point of exhaustion, particularly when he is forced to repeatedly dig and refill a grave-sized hole in the prison yard.

Luke seems to succumb to cowardice and become an errand boy for the guards, but when an opportunity presents itself, he flees again by stealing a truck, with Dragline joining him.

Some time later, the prison crew works near a rural intersection close to where Luke was shot, with Dragline now wearing leg irons and a new Walking Boss supervising.

Pearce, a merchant seaman who later became a counterfeiter and safe cracker, wrote the novel Cool Hand Luke about his experiences working on a chain gang while serving in a Florida prison.

[13][11] Since Pearce had no experience writing screenplays, the producers eventually hired Academy Award nominated writer Frank Pierson in March 1966, to work on the script.

[23] Strother Martin, known for his appearances in westerns,[24] was cast as the Captain, a prison warden depicted as a cruel and insensitive leader, severely punishing Luke for his escapes.

[25] The role of Luke's dying mother, Arletta, who visits him in prison, was passed to Jo Van Fleet after it was rejected by Bette Davis.

[6] The film contains several elements based on Christian themes, including the concept of Luke as a saint who wins over the crowds and is ultimately sacrificed.

Later, while he is digging and filling trenches and confronted by the guards, Tramp (Harry Dean Stanton) performs the spiritual "No Grave Gonna Keep my Body Down".

Pierson explained that in order to advance in the Florida prison system, officers had to take criminology and penology courses at the state university, showing how the warden might know such words.

When Strother Martin hosted Saturday Night Live on April 19, 1980, he played the strict owner of a language camp for children, parodying his Cool Hand Luke role.

In Terry Pratchett's fantasy humor novel The Truth, hired thug Mr Pin says to Charlie, a kidnapped (and not very bright) shopkeeper he is somewhat unsuccessfully training to impersonate Lord Vetinari, the chief ruler of the city-state of Ankh-Morpork, "I think what we have here is a failure to communicate."

[52] For The Boston Globe, Marjory Adams noted that Cool Hand Luke "hits hard, spares no punches, deals with rough, sadistic and unhappy men".

Adams pointed out that "Kennedy stands out as unofficial leader of the convicts", she called van Fleet's role "short but poignant" and Harmon's appearance "a masterpiece of woman's inhumanity to men".

Terry remarked on Newman's "usual competent performance" and the "strong support of the cast", and praised Kennedy, Martin, Askew and Woodward.

Terry opined that the "believable, tuned-in dialog" by Pierson and Person and Conrad Hall's "sun-centered photography" created a "great feeling of the southern discomfort".

He added that Cool Hand Luke "played at the level of observable reality" and that "the intrusion of cinematic artifice seems wholly wrong".

[57] The St. Louis Dispatch praised Kennedy's acting as "raw realism in a fine performance" and Rosenberg's work as "above the cut of the ordinary chain-gang motion picture".

The script was deemed "taut and deftly honed, flavored by humor and perceptive accents" and Rosenberg's direction "smoothly flowing as it is brutally realistic and occasionally raw".

The website's consensus reads: "Though hampered by Stuart Rosenberg's direction, Cool Hand Luke is held aloft by a stellar script and one of Paul Newman's most indelible performances.

He praised the cinematography, capturing the "punishing heat" of the location, and stated that "the physical presence of Paul Newman is the reason this movie works: The smile, the innocent blue eyes, the lack of strutting", which no other actor could have produced as effectively.

In a review called "Sheer Beauty in the Wrong Place", Life, while praising the film's photography, criticized the influence of the visual styles in the depictions of the prison camp.

The magazine declared that the landscapes turned it into "a rest camp [in which] the men are getting plenty of sleep, food and healthy outdoor exercise", and that despite the presence of the guards, it showed that there were "worse ways to pay one's debt with society".

[75] An episode of the television show The Dukes of Hazzard titled "Cool Hands Luke and Bo" was shown with Morgan Woodward playing "Colonel Cassius Claiborne" the boss of a neighboring county and warden of its prison farm.