page_title: Cool Hand Luke
section_title: Release and reception
hierarchical_section_title: Cool Hand Luke / Release and reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Luke is arrested by the police after cutting the heads off parking meters.
context_page_description: Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 American prison drama film directed by Stuart Rosenberg, starring Paul Newman and featuring George Kennedy in an Oscar-winning performance. Newman stars in the title role as Luke, a prisoner in a Florida prison camp who refuses to submit to the system.
  The film, set in the early 1950s, is based on Donn Pearce's 1965 novel of the same name. Pearce sold the story to Warner Bros., who then hired him to write the script. Due to Pearce's lack of film experience, the studio added Frank Pierson to rework the screenplay. Newman's biographer Marie Edelman Borden states that the "tough, honest" script drew together threads from earlier movies, especially Hombre, Newman's earlier film of 1967. The film has been cited by Roger Ebert as an anti-establishment film which was shot during the time of emerging popular opposition to the Vietnam War. Newman's character, Lucas Jackson, is described, as a "free spirit", whose personal record indicates a man who started well in the U.S. Army—receiving medals for bravery in "the war"—rose to the rank of sergeant, yet was discharged as a "buck" private.
context_section_description: Cool Hand Luke opened on November 1, 1967, at Loew's State Theatre in New York City. The proceeds of the premiere went to charities. The film became a box-office success, grossing US$16,217,773 in domestic screenings.
  Variety described Newman's performance as "excellent", noting the supporting cast as "versatile and competent." The New York Times praised the film, remarking that Pearce and Pierson's "sharp script", Rosenberg's "ruthlessly realistic and plausible" staging and direction and Newman's "splendid" performance with an "unfaultable" cast, "elevates" it among other prison films.
  The review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 100% based on reviews by 47 critics, and an average of 8.8/10. Its critical consensus states, "Though hampered by Stuart Rosenberg's direction, Cool Hand Luke is held aloft by a stellar script and one of Paul Newman's most indelible performances." Empire rated it five stars out of five, declaring the movie one of Newman's best performances. Slant rated the film three stars out of four. It described Newman's role as "iconic", also praising its cinematography and sound score. Allmovie praised Newman's performance as "one of the most indelible anti-authoritarian heroes in movie history".
  Critic Roger Ebert included the film in his review collection The Great Movies, rating it four stars out of four. Ebert stated that it was a "great" film and also an anti-establishment one during the time of the Vietnam War. He believed that the film was a product of its time and that no major film company would be interested in producing a film of such "physical punishment, psychological cruelty, hopelessness and equal parts of sadism and masochism" today. He praised the cinematography, capturing the "punishing heat" of the location, and stated that "the physical presence of Paul Newman is the reason this movie works: The smile, the innocent blue eyes, the lack of strutting.", which no other actor could have produced as effectively.
  Contrary to the general consensus, Newman's biographer Lawrence J. Quirk thought that it was one of Newman's weaker performances, stating "For once, even Newman's famed charisma fails him, for in Cool Hand Luke he completely lacks the charm that, say, Al Pacino in Scarecrow effortlessly exhibits when he plays a screw-up who also winds up (briefly) incarcerated." However, Quirk added that Newman's performance was stronger in the second half and said that "to be fair to Newman, he was trying his damnedest to play an impossible part, since Luke is a convict's rationalization fantasy and never a real character". Some authors have criticized the film's depiction of prison life at the time. In a review entitled "Sheer Beauty in the Wrong Place", Life, while praising the film's photography,  criticized the influence of the visual styles in the depictions of the prison camp. The magazine declared that the landscapes turned it into "a rest camp (in which) the men are getting plenty of sleep, food and healthy outdoor exercise." that despite the presence of the guards showed that there were "worse ways to pay one's debt with society". Ron Clooney also remarked that prisons "were not hotels and certainly not the stuff of Cool Hand Luke movies".
caption: The Paul Newman smile, the reason why the movie works according to Roger Ebert
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