Dallas International Film Festival – Cool Hand Luke – 35mm Print!
Paul Newman earned an Academy Award nomination for the playing the title role in COOL HAND LUKE, a charismatic and iconoclastic chain-gang prisoner. And co-star George Kennedy actually brought home the gold, winning the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his robust portrayal of Luke’s bellicose rival-turned-acolyte. But character actor Strother Martin, cast as a drawling tyrant of a warden, arguably fared best of all: He effortlessly achieved a special brand of pop-culture immortality with his impactful utterance of a powerful line—“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate!”—that 1967 moviegoers instantly recognized as both a character-defining exertion of condescending authority, and an astute summation of the zeitgeist.
At a time when political divides and generation gaps seemed to expand on a daily basis, even the most unlikely of role models—like, say, a prisoner on a Florida chain gang—might seem heroic to many simply for rebelling against something, anything, everything. Just like the original advertising tagline observed: “Luke just bugs the Establishment.”