Cool Hand Luke
I realized the other day that, while I admit Paul Newman is a great actor (and chef), I've seen few of his movies. Still haven't seen Butch Cassidy nor The Sting. Unfortunately those aren't available for streaming on Netflix, so I have to watch what is.
Cool Hand Luke is a character piece about a man in the South who doesn't like rules. There isn't much about his behavior that follows logic. He's thrown in jail for removing the heads of parking meters, but he never says why he did it. Surprisingly, he doesn't cause much trouble for the prison guards, until his mother dies. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
For the first half of the movie, Luke shows that he won't yield to the rules set by his fellow prisoners. The ruling prisoner leader is the quintissential "might makes right" character; a man named Dragline, played by George Kennedy. It's hard to believe an actor that appears in Naked Gun could win an Oscar, but here he is. Luke wins over Dragline by taking a viscious beating but not laying down. Works every time. He wins over the remaining prisoners with the famous 50 eggs in an hour scene.
The second half of the movie is Luke butting heads with the warden. Not much happens with the warden until news comes that Luke's mother died. Inexplicably, the warden punishes Luke for this by throwing him in "the box" until after the funeral. I get that they fear Luke is a flight risk, but he couldn't have stayed in the dorm the entire time? He had to go in the box? They should have told us in the beginning that death of a family member results with a night in "the box". That would have been funny. When Luke finishes his time in the box, he escapes the camp and must be hunted down.
The movie goes pretty much as expected from there. No surprises in the plot. The movie effectively makes you sympathize with the prisoners and with Luke, mainly by making sure the guards have no personality and through the death of his mother. The guards seem more evil as the movie goes on, but in a way, Luke pushes them to those extremes with repeated escape attempts.
This is the type of movie, like Shawshank, that Hollywood loves to make and gives, in my mind, way too much credit. Yes this is a good movie. But when you boil away the manipulation, you realize you are rooting for a bad person. I'm really supposed to feel sorry for a guy who blatantly broke the law, without reason, then tries to escape from jail 3 times? What they did with his mother's death was wrong, no question, but that doesn't make all of Luke's actions okay. With Shawshank, we do have cause to pity Andy, but the movie is over the top with every single prison employee being the epitome of evil. It's like they threw him in with Nazi guards. Tone it down a little if you want my sympathies.
Lots of solid actors thrown in as prisoners. Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton get some good face time. The guy that played Trapper on MASH gets some lengthy dialogue. We even get an appearance by Joe Don Baker. Always a crowd pleaser.
First Viewing: 2+3+3+2+2 = 12
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The Drake
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