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Volume 22, Number 1 (1997) reprinted by permission Oklahoma City University Law Review REVIEW OF COOL HAND LUKE OSBORNE M. REYNOLDS, JR.* Gradually, Luke wins the admiration of the other prisoners and is eventually idolized by many of them, including Dragline, due to performing such feats as eating 50 hard-boiled eggs in one hour. He earns his "Cool Hand" nickname by raising the other players in a poker game until they all fold, even though he has a worthless hand--after which he calmly remarks that "Nothing can be a real cool hand." Luke escapes twice, but is recaptured and punished by prison authorities. They beat him, make him stay overnight in "the box," and force him repeatedly to dig a ditch and fill it up again. He embellishes his legend among his fellow prisoners by sending them a postcard during one of his escapes--a picture of him with two women which, upon his capture and return, he tells them was a phoney "cutout." The other prisoners initially refuse to believe his admission, preferring to retain the myth they have created. But when Luke, exhausted from the beatings and forced labor, finally begs the guards for mercy, the other prisoners desert him and treat him with contempt. For a time, Luke acts subservient to the guards and officials. Then, suddenly, while working on the chain gang, he steals a truck and escapes again, accompanied by Dragline. Luke denies to Dragline that the escape was planned, remarking that he "never planned anything in his life." Hunted down and surrounded by prison officers, Luke, at Dragline's urging, finally surrenders, only to be shot by the officers while in the act of giving up. The film closes with Dragline and other prisoners reminiscing about the legend of Luke, his exploits, and his infectious smile. Luke is surely a damning depiction of a disgraceful portion of our prison system. The inhumane working conditions and punishments are vividly portrayed, bringing to mind the Paul Muni classic 1932 film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.2 Even more than that film, Luke concentrates on the individuals caught in the corrupt system, not on the system itself. Unlike such crusading films as Robert Redford's Brubaker,3 it suggests no alternatives to the prison environment in which its story takes place, and presents no solutions for the corruption and degradation it shows. Instead, it uses the chain gang as a setting in which the personalities of the victims of the penal system--and, to a lesser extent, the perpetrators of that system--are revealed. But even the most casual viewer of the film cannot help observing that the chain-gang members are simply worked for all they are worth by the state that has incarcerated them, and that no efforts at rehabilitation or education are discernible. A particularly effective scene is the one in which Luke, at the time of his mother's death, is put in "the box" because of the jailors' fear that he might otherwise try to escape in order to attend her funeral services. The prison officers are interested in only two things: obtaining as much work as possible from the prisoners and preventing their escape. Ironically, the extreme measures taken to prevent escape make it all the more enticing. To a rebel like Luke, escape becomes an irresistible challenge. The extremes to which people will resort in order to escape imprisonment and brutal treatment have often been exhibited in the movies. In the 1958 film The Defiant Ones,4 a plea for racial harmony took the unusual form of a story about an escape from prison by a black man and a white man handcuffed together. In the 1978 film Midnight Express,5 the tortures of a Turkish prison resulted in extreme efforts to obtain freedom. Steve McQueen makes repeated attempts to escape Devil's Island in Papillon.6 Luke's attempted escapes certainly take their place among the most memorable of such scenes in films, and are particularly notable for their humor (as when he spreads chili powder on the ground to foil pursuing bloodhounds) and their poignancy (as when, in his final escape, he takes refuge in a chapel, and despite his admitted lack of familiarity with God, prays for divine aid). Cool Hand Luke remains timely and topical today for its portrayal of incarceration. The brutal treatment and undesirable consequences that it depicts raise questions as to the wisdom and effectiveness of harsh penal measures, at a time when several states have revived, and others are considering the revival of, the chain gang. And movies in the 1990's continue to attract a wide audience when they show, as in 1994's The Shawshank Redemption,7 the corruption of prison officials. Far more than a prison movie, however, Cool Hand Luke belongs to that group of films that depict a nonconformist's struggle to maintain independence in an unappreciative and non-understanding world. Many of these rebels and "loners" are survivors who either ultimately prevail8 or at least live to continue in their unconventional, drifting ways.9 From rebellious Southern belles, such as Bette Davis in Jezebel and Vivien Leigh's Scarlett in Gone With the Wind,10 to bounty-hunters of the Old West, such as the Clint Eastwood character in 1992's Oscar-winning The Unforgiven,11 motion pictures have often celebrated the triumph of independent-minded individualists. But such nonconformists are also, like Luke, sometimes crushed by the system from which they try to escape, especially if they skirt the edges of social acceptability, as did the illfated main characters in Easy Rider,12 or if they operate entirely outside society's rules, as with the title characters in Bonnie and Clyde.13 Luke falls into the "middle" group of movie rebels--doing little real harm to others but still refusing to conform to the standards imposed by authority. A close parallel can be found in Prewitt, the Montgomery Clift character in the 1953 Academy Award winner From Here to Eternity.14 Upon entering the Army, he refused to participate in the boxing team. He was a skilled pugilist, but had once blinded a man in a fight and had thus given up the sport. As with Luke, he was punished for his rebellion, gradually won the admiration of some of his comrades, but was ultimately killed when, after deserting, he tried to return to his post. The "rebel" movies in which the nonconformist is defeated almost invariably portray the forces that cause this defeat in an unfavorable light--for example, the authority figures such as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,15 in which Jack Nicholson's nonconformity eventually results in a lobotomy. Jessica Lange's portrayal of Frances also gives an unflattering view of medical and government authority figures.16 The very forces that are supposed to provide support and encouragement to the downtrodden serve here instead to crush the nonconformist. At its most extreme, the government or other authority may even actively work to destroy the individual, as in a little-known film of the early '60's, Circle of Deception,17 in which a war-time government provides a man with false information, then allows him to be captured and tortured by the enemy. He finally breaks and provides the enemy with the misinformation. While conformity is unfavorably portrayed in these films, alienation from society is generally viewed more sympathetically, as in Jack Nicholson's role in Five Easy Pieces18 or the James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause.19 Indeed, Dean's three memorable screen performances all involved "rebel" characters, and those characters were also portrayed with sympathetic understanding in the other two films, East of Eden20 and Giant.21 The scene toward Luke's climax in which Luke calls upon God points out another feature sometimes found in movies in which the rebel is ultimately crushed: the unanswered plea for rescue and the inability of the rebel to escape from the life previously lived and the mistakes earlier made. Thus, the Susan Hayward character, condemned to death for murder in I Want to Live!,22 could rail against the injustice of her fate, but in the end could find solace only in the prospect of meeting in the hereafter the one person who truly knew she was innocent--the woman she was accused of killing. Like Luke, she hadn't seriously harmed anyone, but was trapped by the careless irresponsibility of her earlier life. An even more pessimistic view of the inability to overcome past conduct and change personality is presented in the 1971 film A Clockwork Orange,23 a futuristic epic depicting an unsuccessful attempt at altering violent human behavior. The 1951 movie A Place in the Sun,24 based on Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy,25 suggests the individual's inability to escape even the consequences of past thoughts and desires: The Montgomery Clift character plots the murder of his pregnant fiancee, but changes his mind at the last moment and tries to rescue her from the drowning "accident" that he had planned. When he is unsuccessful in the rescue, he is convicted and executed for her murder. Just as many of the "rebel" films take a pessimistic view regarding a person's ability to change the course of one's life, these movies also usually portray the individual as powerless, or doomed to eventual defeat, in any struggle against the government and other "establishment" institutions. The individual is trapped either by past mistakes, present environment, or both. A frequent theme is the crushing of the rebellious individual by the all-powerful might of those entrenched in authority. A slave rebellion was, for instance, crushed in the 1960 movie Spartacus.26 As in that movie, the human spirit is nonetheless often shown to be indomitable. The will to revolt against oppression and to achieve freedom lives on. Sometimes the rebel rises to fight again, as Marlon Brando does at the end of On the Waterfront27 --getting up from the ground after having been beaten, striding forth to continue the battle against labor union corruption. Al Pacino similarly survived in Serpico28 despite failure in his efforts at fighting corruption in the police force. Many a wrongly convicted person in films has ultimately cleared his or her name and triumphed over accusers, as did Tom Selleck in An Innocent Man.29 Still, all these films depict the establishment as not only evil but also very strong--capable at its worst of killing innocent persons, and, at its less extreme, of displaying arrogance, evasiveness, and lack of accountability, as with the pursued General Motors executive in the documentary Roger and Me.30 Countless Westerns exemplify the glorification of the courageous individual struggling against great odds to achieve justice in the face of official corruption, indifference, or ineptness. In the most famous line of dialogue in Cool Hand Luke, the Captain (played by Strother Martin) typifies the callousness and brutishness often found in authority figures in the "rebel" movies when he comments, regarding Luke, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." He means a failure of Luke to conform and give unquestioning obedience to the Captain, his commands, and the corrupt system he represents. His statement indicates both his determination and his ability to break Luke's spirit. Movies such as this mirror Americans' deep-rooted distrust of law, government, and establishment figures--a distrust with which any attorney must be prepared to deal. These movies also reflect the commonly held view that the odds are against anyone who, however justly, attempts to fight "city hall." A final theme important to Luke's story is the persistence of--and human need for--myths, idols, and illusions. Luke's fellow prisoners prefer to believe--because they desperately need to--in the legend of "Cool Hand" Luke: carefree and having a great time during his periods of escape from prison. They disbelieve the unromantic reality of the grim life of a hunted man. Even when Luke tells them that his escapades were false, they refuse to believe him. When he becomes subservient to the prison officials, and thus fails to live up to his fellow prisoners' myth about him, they desert and ignore him. In order to cope with the brutality of their daily prison life, they need to escape into dreams about Luke, just as the prisoner in Kiss of the Spider Woman31 needed to escape into the world of comicbook adventures, or as the "birdman of Alcatraz" needed to escape vicariously through his birds. The dreams and vicarious adventures provide not only escape from current reality but hope of future possibilities. One need not, of course, be imprisoned by stone walls or iron bars in order to have a desperate need for such escape and such hope. Blanche De Bois (played, in an Oscar-winning performance, by Vivien Leigh) in A Streetcar Named Desire32 was as much imprisoned by her guilts and longings as any convict is imprisoned in the cell of a penitentiary, and thus she created her own dream-world of men who desired her and would give her the love for which she yearned. Imprisonment of either body or mind causes the human soul to seek freedom through dreams of past, future, or imagined journeys. Few who are imprisoned can achieve the magnanimity of Anne Frank, and many prisoners may disagree with her conclusion that people are basically good. But many can achieve some solace from letting their imagination run wild through the outside world, as Luke's fellow prisoners let their imagination run with him during his escapes. When he made the "final escape" into death, they simply perpetuated and augmented the legend of what he had been and what he had done. Thus, his spirit lived on in their memories of his unpredictable nature, his impish smile, and his restless ways. In reality, the prisoners might have nothing, not even freedom. In their dreams, though, nothing can be a real cool hand. |
