Movie Description

Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 American prison drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg, starring Paul Newman and featuring George Kennedy in an Oscar-winning performance. Newman stars in the title role as Luke, a prisoner in a Florida prison camp who refuses to submit to the system.

The film, set in the early 1950s, is based on Donn Pearce's 1965 novel of the same name. Pearce sold the story to Warner Bros., who then hired him to write the script. Due to Pearce's lack of film experience, the studio added Frank Pierson to rework the screenplay. Newman's biographer Marie Edelman Borden states that the "tough, honest" script drew together threads from earlier movies, especially Hombre, Newman's earlier film of 1967. The film has been cited by Roger Ebert as an anti-establishment film which was shot during the time of emerging popular opposition to the Vietnam War. Newman's character, Lucas Jackson, is described (by the notorious "Captain," upon his arrival at the prison), as a "free spirit," whose personal record (read out loud because of its unusual details) indicates a man who started well in the US Army�receiving medals for bravery in �the war��rose to the rank of Sergeant, yet was discharged as a "buck" Private.

Upon its release, Cool Hand Luke received favorable reviews and became a box-office success. The film cemented Newman's status as one of the era's top box-office actors, while the film was described as the "touchstone of an era." Newman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, George Kennedy won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, Pearce and Pierson were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and the score by Lalo Schifrin was also nominated for the Best Original Score. In 2005, the United States Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry, considering it to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." It has a 100% rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The quotation used by the prison warden (Strother Martin) in the film, which begins with "What we've got here is failure to communicate," was listed at No. 11 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 most memorable movie lines.