Paul Newman @ 100: "Cool Hand Luke"
Wednesday, January 22, 2025 at 8:00PM by Nick Taylor
I'm not sure when I first became aware of Paul Newman. Much like how Nathaniel described in his write-up of The Hustler, he's been a ubiquitous figure without a clear entry point into my consciousness. My big introductions to him as an actor came with the one-two punch of Hud - which Juan Carlos paid great tribute to - and Cool Hand Luke (on referral from Nick Davis's excellent write-up of both films). I also went springboarding from my love of Law & Order reruns straight to The Verdict and was completely awed by the whole film, but that's for later. Newman's career is so impressive that even with so much time to catch up with his filmography, try his sauces, learn more about his activism, and read his incredible biography from last year, I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface of what he contributed to the world.
But today, we're here for one man. A cool man with a cool hand. A man working hard to retain his individuality against folks determined to flatten him into whatever paragon best serves them. Set in the post-war Florida of the early 1950s, our next dive into Paul Newman's decorated career is his rebellious, discontent war veteran in Stuart Rosenberg's Cool Hand Luke...
Lucas Jackson is brought forth into his film, spinning like a top. He's drunk out of his mind and has committed to getting even drunker, and is idling the time away in the black of the night by screwing the heads off of parking meters. After each head clangs to the ground, Luke softly lays them next to their decapitated pole. He's chopping with no obvious pattern or process in mind, wearing a sly grin as he vandalizes public property. Conrad Hall's camera places Luke as one man amidst endless rows of poles, using the street lights shining on the wet asphalt to make the setup moody and intimidating. Luke is already spiraling into a void. Getting picked up by the cops changes his location but not his outlook on life.
When asked by bosses and fellow inmates why he committed such an unusual crime, Luke offers no response. Three years in the army and he was never promoted, seemingly of his own volition. He's quietly satisfied with the commotion he's caused amongst the men but also genuine about his own inchoate motives and restless soul. Suddenly, everyone straightens up to take notice of the pretty boy with steel flickering underneath those ridiculously beautiful eyes. Luke walks into the prison and becomes a new center of gravity, something we quickly surmise has happened to him many times before.
Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson's script - surely adhering to the structure of Pearce's novel - takes an episodic approach to Luke's trials and camaraderie in the prison. He remains at all times a somewhat aloof man, even as we learn more about his past and watch him take greater risks to less tangible ends. Rosenberg does a good job of reconciling this portrait of one man's sacrifice with the different perspectives impressed onto him by his disciples and jailers. The Christ imagery doesn't make this any subtler, but having Luke's contented collapse after an egg-eating contest resemble Jesus on the cross wins points for disarming humor, and it makes the total sincerity of Luke's atheism into a heavier thematic element.
It rests on Newman to create an approachable, off-the-cuff guy with an ineffable mystique to his nonconformity. This isn't Hud Bannon's hot-blooded affronts and smug facades, but the foibles and discontents of a 40-something who's lived many lives and has been met with some authority working against him every time. It'd be wrong to say Newman rejects the symbolic aspects of the role outright, but he refuses to simplify Luke's goodness and suffering to fit Rosenberg's parable. He ensures the prisoner's decency, desires, aimlessness, bonhomie with his fellow man, and reflexive jabs at authority are resolutely human-sized in scale. Newman's palpable good nature also ensures that Luke's rebelliousness - and, by extension, the community he inspires among his peers - is backed by real integrity.
Relating to his companions, it's noteworthy how much power Cool Hand Luke gets from the ensemble of men. Conrad Hall's cinematography earns some credit for this, given how the camera relishes the challenge of blocking so many bodies in concert and making those bodies harmonize onscreen. Luke is rarely rhetorically emphasized in crowd shots, allowing us the opportunity to appreciate him as one of many figures trying to retain their humanity. But Newman deserves credit, too, for folding himself so fully into this cadre of distinctive faces, many of whom now possess a celebrity they absolutely did not have when this was filmed. He's such a great buddy to these guys, building a tremendous rapport with them as a collective while striking distinct chords to noteworthy characters. I say he deserves at least half the credit for trimming down Arthur Kennedy's engrossing, if occasionally florid performance - Dragline is more interesting when he's quieter, and Kennedy's better when he drops the Bayou accent. He should have gotten custody of Kennedy's Oscar!
Newman's integrity becomes even more crucial in Cool Hand Luke's second hour, as the built-in cruelty of the carceral state preemptively punishes him for wanting to attend his mother's funeral. Now he's got a real system to throw himself against, rather than the pecking orders of the prisoners or petty one-upmanship with the bosses. It's a losing battle from the start, but Luke never treats it like it is, and Newman steps up to push his character's wiliness in this new context. His escape plans are executed so smoothly and spontaneously I couldn't help wondering if he'd just been carrying them in his back pocket for a rainy day.
Even so, he fails, and is punished hideously for daring to think he could get away in the first place. Some of his suffering happens offscreen, while other abuses are made into public spectacle for the actor to dramatize. Newman carries all of this pain and shame with a new weight in his soul, a slouch in his posture, a thudding of his steps previously unimaginable to the other inmates. He shows us how the Luke we first met has been worn down by the crushing, molding hands of those who see themselves as his betters. It's even more harrowing because Newman embodies this transformation with the same unfussy blend of human-scaled individuality and collective ideal he's possessed this whole time. The actor makes Luke cohere as Man and Symbol as fully as he's made Cool Hand Luke cohere as a prison drama, a paean of brotherly love, a nonconformist ode from one post-war era to another, and a religiously-inflected parable of a non-believer asking God why, why, why did things have to be so difficult when all he wanted was to be a good man.
On a closing note, I am so fascinated by Luke's one scene with his mother Arletta (Jo Van Fleet) as an ur-text for how to read Newman's performance and his stabilization of the film. Both actors convey a long history and a similar temperament on life, yet, where Arletta is so candid about her life and her moods, Luke completely closes himself off from the same physical and verbal expressiveness. Newman is so still in this scene, so watchful, tender, and receptive to her dialogue without actually reciprocating Van Fleet's energy. And isn't this how Luke treats everyone he considers his friend? Allowing his wavelength to harmonize with theirs without ever letting them see beneath his aloof exterior? You can see why Dragline is so captured by Luke's smile, so genuine and beautiful and uninhibited for a man who always seems in control of himself and his world. Isn't this how Newman himself treats the film? Genuinely inspirational in his confidence, his decency, his economy of gesture and feeling even when he has to dial the temperature of his performance into uncharted waters. You couldn't ask for a better shepherd than Paul Newman, and Cool Hand Luke would be impossible to imagine without his smile to guide it.
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Reader Comments (2)
Ever since reading Cláudio's remarks about Newman's (born 1925) early work, in particular Somebody Up There Likes Me—"You can see him try so hard to be like Dean, or an off-brand Brando, that it's like you're watching a performance of a performance"—I've been imagining Dean (born 1931), Brando (born 1924) and Montgomery Clift (born 1920) in each of the profiled performances in this series. It's an interesting exercise. In the case of Cool Hand Luke, we even have Jo Van Fleet, so memorable as Dean's scene partner in East of Eden and Clift's in Wild River. I'm not saying any of the other legends would have been better casting choices, but the resulting films would have been very different.
Paul... Paul... Paul... ❤️❤️❤️🔥🔥🔥