"What we have here is failure to communicate."
Captain (Strother Martin)
It is often said — and justifiably, too — that 1939 was the greatest year for movies.
And it was.
But the runnerup on that list has to be 1967. It produced "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Graduate," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "In Cold Blood," "In the Heat of the Night" and so many others — and then, on this day, two months before the end of the year, the hits just kept on coming.
On this day in 1967 America first watched "Cool Hand Luke" on its movie screens.
And, while it is hard to single out one performance from all the performances in his career, Paul Newman's work as the nonconformist Luke may well have been his best.
Luke was a cool customer, all right, just like the tagline for the movie said — "He was a cool customer ... until the law made it hot for him!"
He was a member of a Southern chain gang who absolutely would not give in to authority. It was a trait he paid for, frequently.
His fellow prisoners admired that quality.
"You're an original," George Kennedy, who won Best Supporting Actor, told him at one point. "That's what you are!"
The audience learned fairly early just how much of a nonconformist Luke was. In the service he had been awarded a bronze star and became a sergeant — but was a private when he was discharged.
The men all seemed drawn to Luke. They looked up to him. He was a hero to them. He wasn't comfortable in that role, though. It wasn't one he sought. After all, it required him to live up to others' expectations, and he was still trying to find his own way.
The prison staff took every opportunity to break Luke, even putting him in solitary after his mother had died.
The guard who put him in solitary tried to justify it by saying, "Sorry, Luke. Just doin' my job. You gotta appreciate that."
Defiant as ever, Luke replied, "Callin' it your job don't make it right, Boss."
The prisoners called everyone on the staff boss, but I guess the only true boss was Strother Martin, who played the Captain — and uttered the line that everyone always remembers from that movie: "What we have here is failure to communicate."
And the scene everyone always remembers — well, all the guys for sure — is the one in which actress Joy Harmon, known only as The Girl (Kennedy's character called her Lucille), washed a car in full view of the spellbound prisoners.
There was a void left in the cinematic role of anti–hero when James Dean died. Newman, who was nominated for Best Actor (and would have been a better choice than the winner, Rod Steiger), stepped forward to fill that void along with Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen.
A persuasive case can be made that each man proved himself worthy of being Dean's heir as the anti–hero, but Newman's body of work was the most convincing.
And "Cool Hand Luke" was his best work, signaling the true return of the anti–hero.
