Cool Hand Luke (1967) on Netflix
In a Florida town, Lucas Jackson cuts the heads off parking meters and is sentenced to two years on a prison chain gang. He will not submit to Dragline, the prisoners' leader.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Sent to a rural Florida prison camp for two years after he cuts the heads off parking meters, Lucas Jackson joins a road gang that works in heat and humidity under the Captain and Boss Godfrey. Even small breaches of the rules bring a night in the box, a cramped wooden booth in the yard. Dragline leads the prisoners, and most of them submit to him. Luke simply does not change his behavior to please others, and when Dragline takes his manner as a challenge, the two are put in a boxing match. Luke takes a beating without staying down. The other prisoners begin to treat him as a hero, and the guards take notice.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The prison-farm set built for the film was ordered "condemned for code violations" when a county building inspector mistook the construction for migrant worker housing.
- The part of Luke's dying mother, Arletta, who visits him in prison, went to Jo Van Fleet only after Bette Davis turned it down.
- Worried about the box office of Camelot and Bonnie and Clyde, George Kennedy spent $5,000 on trade advertising during the Oscar nomination process, and later said the supporting-actor win multiplied his salary by ten.
- The lead role of Luke was first considered for Jack Lemmon or Telly Savalas; Paul Newman asked for the part after hearing about the project.
- Director Stuart Rosenberg banned wives from the set so the cast would internalize chain-gang life, and Joy Harmon waited two days alone in her hotel room before her car-washing scene was shot.
- Lalo Schifrin's cue from the road-paving Tar Sequence became, for years, the theme music of local TV news programs around the world, mostly ABC-owned stations in the United States.
- Donn Pearce, a former merchant seaman who became a counterfeiter and safe cracker, wrote the novel Cool Hand Luke from his own time on a Florida chain gang.
- The "Failure to communicate" line opens the 1990 Guns N' Roses song "Civil War" and also appears in the band's 2008 song "Madagascar".
