COOL HAND LUKE

Nothing else in the Stuart Rosenberg canon quite prepares you for COOL HAND LUKE. It was an instant classic and it hardly mattered who the director was, (though I guess a bad director could have messed things up). This was the great anti-establishment movie of its day, (a late sixties REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE), with that blue-eyed beauty and most iconic of anti-establishment actors, Paul Newman, cast in the title role. As Fast Eddie Felson and Hud Bannon, Newman had already held two fingers up to the establishment and in many ways this was the role that came to define him.

The plot, by now, is familiar to generations of moviegoers. Newman is sentenced to two years on a chain gang for screwing the heads of parking metres, in itself something of a motiveless crime; he claims he was just settling old scores and you know from the second you see him he isn't going to stay put so it's a movie about a man who becomes a hero to his fellow prisoners for continually running away and for being continually brought back and it's full of classic scenes; the car-washing scene, the egg eating competition, the tar-rolling scene, the boxing match between Newman and George Kennedy.

The casting, of course, was crucial. It was a movie full of identifiable character parts where the actors cast as prisoners, the warden and the screws all had their marks to make, (though no African-American or gay prisoners)? Kennedy got the Supporting Actor Oscar and Strother Martin was magnificent as the warden but it has one of he great supporting casts, all brilliant and too many to mention with the wonderful Jo Van Fleet taking the only significant female role as Newman's mother. It was adapted by Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson from Pearce's novel, Lalo Schifrin did the score and Conrad Hall photographed it in Panavision so did it really matter who the director was or was this just one of those movies that was destined to become a classic from the pre-production phase? Like I said, nothing else Rosenberg ever did came close.