Cool Hand Luke (1967)

A new coworker and I started talking movies about a week ago, and both made long lists of recommended movies afterward. Mine topped 50 titles; hers, nearly the same. One of the movies she recommended was this one, Cool Hand Luke, a movie I'd never seen.

It’s a beautiful movie: the cinematography is perfect, and the shot selection is fantastic, especially early on. It manages to be of-its-time, but not seem dated, which is an interesting trick.

But it isn’t an easy movie to watch. Newman is great. The story is interseting - iconic, often funny. But watching a character this masochistic isn’t enjoyable.

Luke does nothing to make his life easier - unless it will help make his life even more difficult later. I feel like foreign films at the time - and in a much more superficial way, movies today - would have examined his impulse toward self abuse. What caused him to behave so intensely self-destructively. But here it isn’t examined at all. (It may be hinted at, but only in the vaguest of ways - he was a war hero, he had to kill people in that war.) That isn’t a flaw in the movie, but it does make the movie more unapologetically masochistic than I’m used to seeing, or that makes for comfortable viewing.

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3.5 stars; TV; March 22nd.