Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Actually his whole body is cool.
Paul Newman: the archetypal effortlessly cool toxic male. The guy who processes his emotions by pushing them deep deep down. The guy whose broken ferality makes you want to date him even though of course you shouldn’t date him. The guy who stalked his way through Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, and Hud. Well, that guy’s back in Cool Hand Luke.
The movie starts with Luke (Paul Newman) drunkenly chopping the heads off parking meters. For this sexy crime he’s sentenced to two years in a Florida prison. By day, he does road work, and by night, he chills with his new prison buddies, including Dragline (George Kennedy).1 The most famous hangout scene is when Luke eats 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour.
But it’s not all fun and games. First, Luke’s mother (played by Jo Van Fleet) dies, leading to this gutting scene. The prison’s Captain (Strother Martin) thinks this might make Luke want to escape, so Luke’s taken off the road gang and locked up in the box during the day. Luke does end up running, and when he’s caught, the Captain give him leg irons:
Captain: [The leg irons are] for your own good.
Luke: I wish you’d stop being so good to me, Captain.
Captain: Don’t you ever talk that way to me. NEVER, NEVER! [Captain hits Luke with a blackjack, then composes himself] What we’ve got here is failure to communicate! Some men you just can’t reach.
This leads to multiple more escape attempts, with the stubborn Luke refusing to give up or give in. In his final one, he and Dragline steal a truck and end up in a church surrounded by police. Dragline tells him, “Luke, you’ve gotta listen to me: all you’ve got to do is give up,” but if you’ve been watching the movie, you know that ain’t gonna happen. Luke looks outside, hollers “what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate,” and is shot dead by the man with no eyes.
Rating: 8/10, more movies should have scenes where a dude eats 50 eggs.
Cast and Crew
Pauline Kael has a great quote about Paul Newman: “There are certain actors who have such extraordinary audience rapport that the audience does not believe in their villainy. [They] project such a traditional heroic frankness and sweetness that the audience dotes on them, seeks to protect them from harm or pain.” That’s Luke: anti-authoritarian but wounded and vulnerable in a way that excuses any of his bad behavior.
We saw Newman last in 1963’s Hud, and between that and Cool Hand Luke he only made a few movies. One was Torn Curtain (1966), an Alfred Hitchcock (!) film with Julie Andrews (!!). Unfortunately, it’s kind of eh. Newman also starred in Hombre (1967), a Western based on an Elmore Leonard novel.
Our journey with Newman will take a bit of a hiatus, but we’ll see him again when we get to his three 1980s nominations. That’s when we’ll find out if age mellows out our crazy ol’ Paul. I kind of hope it does. I want to protect him from harm and pain.
George Kennedy played Dragline and won an Oscar for his work. From then on, Kennedy was a “that guy,” popping up in many memorable roles, including in the Airport and Naked Gun films.
The Cool Hand Luke theme was composed by Lalo Schifrin, an Argentinian-American composer whose best-known work is the “Mission: Impossible” theme.2 Sure, everyone knows that theme. But Schifrin was more than just themes: he also played with tango great Astor Piazzolla3 and worked as an arranger for “rumba king” Xavier Cugat.
Wait, rumba? Which Cuban dance is that? Don’t worry, we’ve got your Cuban dance cheat sheet below:
You’re on your own for the (non-Cuban but easy to mix up) samba, tango, carioca, cumbia, merengue, and bachata. This would’ve been a fun Trivia section, but no, the movie we watched is Cool Hand Luke, and people don’t think about dancing when they think about Cool Hand Luke. You know what they think about?
The Trivia
Eggs. Let’s start by discussing dishes where the egg is basically the only ingredient. The ones you can order at a diner, the ones whose names simply describe how the egg was cooked. You may know boiled, fried, and scrambled, but below are some of the more interesting ones:
Poached: Crack an egg into boiling water and give it three minutes. Here’s Gordon Ramsey explaining how to do it.
Coddled: These are like poached eggs, but instead of directly dropping the egg into the water, you have the egg in a ramekin separated from the water. This essentially steams the egg.
Shirred egg. These eggs are baked. They get their name from the dish they were originally baked in (a shirrer), but nowadays you can just bake them in a ramekin.
Okay, how about some eggs dishes that you can’t order in a diner?
Century Egg: this is an egg that’s aged for weeks or months (but definitely not a century) in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime, and rice hulls. It’s basically like pickling, except that your pickle is an egg and now it’s black and gross.
Tamagoyaki: These are thin layers of egg that are cooked and rolled up. Tamago is Japanese for “egg”4 and yaki means “cooked over high heat.”
Shakshuka: This one’ll make you hungry. It’s a big hot bowl of spiced tomato and bell pepper goo with little pockets of poached egg.
Scotch Egg: Take a boiled egg, wrap it in sausage, coat it in breadcrumbs, and deep fry it. I had never had it but, in the spirit of learnin’ stuff, I’m getting one this weekend. I’ll report back on how it is.
And for dessert, how about custard? That’s just egg yolks, milk, cream, flour, and sugar. Eat by itself or use as a base for something like crème brûlée. Or can I interest you in a soufflé? You take that custard mixture, add in whipped egg whites, and bake.
Odds and Ends
Donn Pearce, the author of the book Cool Hand Luke was based on, did not like the film, which is how it always is…poker advice from Luke: “nothin’ can be a real cool hand”…the egg white is known as the albumen, from the Latin word for “white.”
Some of the other notable actors in the prison: Dennis Hopper, Wayne Rogers (who later played Trapper John on “M*A*S*H”) and Ralph Waite (who later played the patriarch on “The Waltons”).
He also did the theme for “Mannix.” “Mannix” (1967–1975) starred Mike Connors as the titular Joe Mannix, a L.A. private investigator. His secretary, Peggy Fair, was played by Gail Fisher; she was the first black woman to win an Emmy.
Piazzolla was perhaps the GOAT virtuoso on the bandoneon. (A bandoneon is a type of concertina, and a concertina is sorta like an accordion.)
Cf. the ‘90s toy Tamagotchi, which derived its name from tamago (“egg”) and uotchi (“watch”).