Cool Hand Luke

In my rather casual research into the America's counterculture film movement, Cool Hand Luke is not a film you hear a lot of when discussing the era's seminal films. It's a headscratcher why that might be. Cool Hand Luke is a rebellious anti-establishment piece with a charismatic anti-hero leading the way, however you'll rarely hear Cool Hand Luke uttered in between The Graduate and Bonnie Clyde, two films that sandwiched Luke and helped used in the the movement.

Maybe it's because Cool Hand Luke isn't an auteur film. Stuart Rosenberg, is a name I didn't know until yesterday. To his detriment, he simply crafted the best possible movie out of the scripts he was given, leaving stylistic and pay-attention-to-me flourishes out.

It also good be that Cool Hand Luke is hilarious, not in a black humor Graduate kind of way, but actually laugh-out-loud funny. This is largely because of Dragline, a foghorn leghorn type that Edward Kennedy picked up an Oscar for playing, who drops one humorous line after another as soon as he steps down as the chain-gang's alpha male to take the role of Luke's right hand man.

There are elements that Cool Hand Luke share's with Cuckoo's Nest and The Graduate but seldom is it given those films place in film history and that's just not right boss.

* Cool Hand Luke is the movie that would have resulted had the Coen Brothers directed Shawshank.