Cool Hand Luke (1967) exemplifies the 1960s.  With its anti-establishment theme and emphasis on the importance of standing for something—even if you’re still figuring out what that something is—Cool Hand Luke spoke to a generation finding its voice in a decade of change.  

For Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke cemented his super-star status with a fourth Oscar nomination and long-awaited financial stability.  The years surrounding the film’s release marked a time of growth for Paul as he became more vocal in the political arena and directed his first feature film, 1968’s Rachel, Rachel.  

Despite the increased fame and success he found in the late 1960s, Paul Newman remained a grounded family man.  Together, Paul and his wife, Joanne Woodward, continued to demonstrate that with boundless love, loyalty, and hard work, a marriage can survive and thrive, even in a toxic environment like Hollywood.

The Plot

It’s Florida, circa 1950. We meet our anti-hero, Luke Jackson (Paul Newman), right away. He’s drunkenly cutting the heads off parking meters in a small town that, we can infer, doesn’t have much going on.

Luke is soon caught by the police and sentenced to two years in prison.  The punishment does not seem to fit the crime.

When Luke arrives at the prison, located in a deep south middle-of-no-where, he meets the captain of the prison (Strother Martin). Captain knows right away that Luke is different.

And will probably be trouble.

Luke Learns About The Box

Luke soon meets the other inmates and learns all the prison rules.  The take away from the prison rules: if you do anything at all, Captain can arbitrarily decide to make you spend a night, or several, in “the box.”  The box is just what is sounds like—a small box structure barely big enough for a man to stand in, where inmates are sent to spend time in solitary.

We hope Luke won’t ever have to spend time in the box.  But we also kind of know he will.

The other inmates initially don’t like Luke, mostly because he’s the new guy.  But also because Luke stands out: he says smart-alec things to the prison floorwalkers and sticks up for new inmates when they get hazed by Dragline (George Kennedy), the alpha inmate.  Luke stands by his own moral convictions and sense of justice, even when the smart thing to do is just be quiet, or let something slide.

Like Paul Newman himself, Luke Jackson is a tenacious character.

The Fight

The inmates’ view of Luke begins to change after Dragline, a huge bear of a man, challenges Luke to a fight.  Luke, half his size, accepts.  It’s a touching scene, watching Luke get knocked to the ground by this giant man again and again.  But somehow Luke always finds the strength to get back up and keep fighting.

It’s certainly in Luke’s best interest to stay on the ground after Dragline’s powerful punches.  The other inmates, and eventually, even Dragline himself, plea with Luke to stop getting up, to just stop trying.

But Luke won’t quit.

He can’t.

“Stay down, you’re beat!”

Says Dragline.  But Luke responds,

“You’re gonna have to kill me.”

A Real Cool Hand

Eventually, Dragline walks away from the fight, leaving Luke the last man standing.  Luke wins not just the fight, but the respect of his fellow inmates.

After the triumphant fight, Luke wins a poker game with a truly terrible hand.  This cements his nickname, Cool Hand Luke, coined by none other than Dragline, who now has great respect for his new friend:

“Nothin’. A handful of nothin’. He [Luke] beat you with nothin’.  Just like today when he kept comin’ back at me with nothin’.”

To which Luke famously responds:

“Yeah, well, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.”

Cool Hand Luke Escapes

Luke has officially gained the respect and admiration of the inmates, and even some of the prison floorwalkers.

But after Luke gets word that his mother died—and Captain decides to give Luke some time in the box, just in case he’s tempted to run away for her funeral—we sense that Luke’s unbreakable spirit and rebellious streak are about to be put to some self-destructive uses.

Captain shouldn’t have put him in the box.

Luke ultimately escapes from prison three times.  But each time, his freedom is short-lived.  When caught after his second escape, Luke is told that if he tries to run away again, he will be killed.  Enter the famous line,

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,”

Said by Captain before he dishes out Luke’s punishment.

One Last Try

Luke’s spirit is temporarily broken after his second escape, and it looks like he may just accept his fate and serve the rest of his prison sentence without resistance.

But…once working roadside duty on the chain gang again, Luke has an opportunity to steal a truck and make a run for it.  

And he takes it.

This time Dragline joins him.  After they’ve escaped a fair distance, Luke says they should separate.  Dragline reluctantly agrees—he doesn’t really know what to do without Luke—and Dragline is soon caught.

Luke, still free, finds himself inside a church and touchingly tries to talk with God:

“Anybody here?  Hey, Ol’ Man, You home tonight?…about time we had a little talk…I know I got no call to ask for much, but even so, You’ve gotta admit, You ain’t dealt me no cards in a long time.  It’s beginnin’ to look like You got things fixed so I can’t never win out.  Inside, outside, all of ’em rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am.  Now just where am I supposed to fit in?  

Ol’ Man, I gotta tell Ya. I started out pretty strong and fast.  But it’s beginnin’ to get to me.  When does it end? What do Ya got in mind for me? What do I do now?  I guess I’m pretty tough to deal with, huh? A hard case.  I guess I gotta find my own way.”

Before long, the church is surrounded.  Captain and his henchmen are outside.  They send in Dragline to try to convince Luke that if he comes out without a fight, they won’t kill him.

Liars.

Triumph in Death

Luke is shot in the neck.

Captain tells his driver to take Luke the long way to the prison hospital, ensuring that Luke won’t survive the drive.

Luke’s death is a tragic victory.  Smiling even as he dies, Luke’s life and death have inspired the other inmates, particularly Dragline, to be their own men, to think for themselves and to stand for something.  As Dragline tells the other inmates at the film’s close:

“He was smiling…That’s right.  You know, that, that Luke smile of his.  He had it on his face right to the very end.  Hell, if they didn’t know it ‘fore, they could tell right then that they weren’t a-gonna beat him.  That old Luke smile.  Old Luke, he was some boy.  Cool Hand Luke.  Hell, he’s a natural-born world-shaker.”

And that’s the end of the film.

Cool Hand Luke Author: Donn Pearce

Cool Hand Luke was a 1965 novel written by Donn Pearce.  The book was partly based on Pearce’s own life.  And Donn Pearce led quite a life.

In 1944, at age sixteen, Pearce lied about his age, registered for the draft, and joined the army.  But army rules didn’t agree with Donn Pearce—shades of Luke Jackson—and he went AWOL.  After turning himself in, Pearce was quickly transferred to a combat infantry unit.  His mother, worried that her son would soon see battle on the European front, informed the army of his real age.  Pearce was thrown out of the army, and promptly joined the Merchant Marine.

The Merchant Marine took the now eighteen-year-old Donn Pearce to Europe, where he began counterfeiting American money.  In Marseilles, Pearce was caught attempting to pass counterfeit bills.  He was arrested and sentenced to prison, but soon escaped.  After forging new identification papers, Pearce boarded a ship to Canada, where he became a burglar and safecracker.  

Cool Hand Luke Inspiration

Pearce eventually made his way back to the United States, where he continued safecracking.  In 1949, he was caught and sentenced to serve time on a Department of Corrections chain gang in Florida.  Donn Pearce was 20 years old.  During his two years on the chain gang, Pearce met twenty-two year-old Luther Catrett, whose death by gunshot at a local church after escaping roadside work detail served as part-inspiration for Pearce’s Cool Hand Luke Jackson.

When Donn Pearce was released from prison in the early 1950s, he went straight, finding his niche as a writer, and making ends meet as a bail bondsman in Fort Lauderdale.  Following Cool Hand Luke, Pearce authored three additional novels.

Rumors persist that Donn Pearce based his Cool Hand Luke Jackson on Donald Graham Garrison, a career safecracker with whom Pearce briefly worked in the late 1940s before serving time.  But this is untrue.  In a 1981 interview, Pearce set the record straight:

“The book was based on three things: My own experiences, the Luke [i knew] who was killed in ’49, and 20 percent pure fiction.  If Cool Hand Luke were anybody alive today, it would have to be me.”

Pearce sold his story to Warner Bros. for $80,000, and was paid an additional $15,000 to write the screenplay.  Television director Stuart Rosenberg saw great potential in Pearce’s story, and brought it to Jack Lemmon’s production company, Jalem Productions, which agreed to produce the film.

Casting Cool Hand Luke

Initially, it looked as if Jack Lemmon himself would play Luke.  But Lemmon soon realized he wasn’t right for the part.  It didn’t take long for Stuart Rosenberg to find his ideal Luke.  As Rosenberg later recalled:

“Back in 1967, there were basically two movie stars in the world: Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.  And I decided Paul would be perfect to play Luke.”

Rosenberg set up a meeting with Paul at his Beverly Hills home, and was immediately impressed with the man he met:

“I was very impressed because he’d read the script, read the original novel, and his intelligence was very impressive.  There was no bull.  And although I had no real track record as a feature film director, he committed to the film because he liked the character.”

According to Paul, he liked the character so much that he agreed to star in Cool Hand Luke before seeing a finished script.  As Newman recalled in his autobiography:

“It’s one of the few roles I committed myself to on the basis of the original book, without seeing a script.  It would have worked no matter how many mistakes were make.”

The Cool Hand Luke Set

Before filming began, the production crew went to Florida’s Tavares Road Prison, where Pearce had served time.  Inspired by what they saw, the crew then recreated the prison in Stockton, CA, where the majority of Cool Hand Luke would be filmed.  No detail was forgotten, down to the Spanish moss, which was imported and draped on the set buildings and trees to create the feel of a deep-south prison.  

In his autobiography [aff. link], George Kennedy (Dragline), recalled being ‘fascinated’ by the result of the production crew’s painstaking attention to detail:

“Moviemaking is a precise business, and what looked like a used jail was actually all brand-new.  It was the detail that fascinated me.  The original [prison] in Florida was old, the sideboards warped and the beams aged.  It was all duplicated exactly.  If you didn’t know otherwise, you would have bet hard cash that it’d been there fifty years or more.”

The set was so realistic, a county building inspector ordered it condemned, believing the dilapidated-looking fake prison to be migrant worker housing.

Paul Newman Did His Own Banjo Playing

Paul Newman did his usual in-depth study to prepare for the role of Luke Jackson, spending time in West Virginia to develop an appropriate accent and demeanor for the role.

Newman even learned how to play the banjo for the scene in which Luke plays and sings “Plastic Jesus” to mourn the passing of his mother.  Paul believed that anything less than real skill with the instrument would detract from the poignancy of the scene.  The problem though, as George Kennedy aptly put it, was that:

“Paul knew as much about the banjo as I do about baking cakes.”

Newman convinced Stuart Rosenberg to film the scene at the end of the shooting schedule, to give him as much time as possible to learn how to play.  Harry Dean Stanton (Tramp), who introduced Paul to the song on set and inspired its placement in the film, served as Paul’s banjo instructor.

When the time came to film the scene, Newman was ready.  Too ready, in fact, for the likes of Stuart Rosenberg.  As Rosenberg remembered:

“I wanted it to be the first time on film that people really saw Paul Newman weep.  But Paul is such an incredible professional, and on the afternoon we were going to shoot, he invited me into his dressing room and played the song for me.  I said to myself, ‘He’s doing it too well!’  I wanted more ragged edges from him.”

To achieve those “ragged edges,” Rosenberg decided to shake Paul’s confidence.  According to Rosenberg:

“Just as were were ready to go [film], I thought I needed to upset Paul a little to get what I wanted.  Before he hit the first chord, I stopped everything and said, “Paul, sorry, we’ve got a copyright problem with the song.  You’re going to have to reverse the first and second lines.”

Newman, understandably upset, muttered a few curse words before conceding to the director’s request.  But just as Paul resumed playing, Rosenberg stopped him again:

“I let him go on a little but then I yelled ‘Cut!’—though I’d prearranged with the [camera] operator to keep going.  ‘Paul, I think moving things around is really screwing things up, I think maybe you should—’  He cut me off and just started to sing.  I motioned to him to just keep going.  He stopped, started again, and the tears started to come down.  It was brilliant.”

George Kennedy called Newman’s performance in the scene “magnificent,” and remembered hearing Rosenberg tell Paul on set that “nobody could do it [the scene] better.”  But Newman was never satisfied with the banjo scene in the finished film.  As Paul wrote in his autobiography:

“I know people felt it was very emotional, very moving.  But I would have done the whole thing much better in the privacy of my bathroom.  I don’t mind standing up and singing in front of people, but if you heard me sing, you wouldn’t ask me to do it.  I was really unhappy with the first takes…I really don’t know about that weeping.”

The Cool Hand Luke Egg Eating Scene

Paul may have learned the banjo for Cool Hand Luke, but he was not about to consume 50 eggs for the film’s famous egg eating scene.  Luke’s bet with the other inmates that he can eat 50 hard boiled eggs in an hour inspired viewers of Cool Hand Luke—from college students to soldiers in Vietnam—to recreate the challenge, sometimes with fatal results.

Over the years, countless interviewers have asked Paul Newman just how many eggs he consumed for the scene.

“I never swallowed an egg.  The magic of film,”

He told Leonard Maltin in a 1993 interview.

“Isn’t Method acting about doing the real thing?”

An interviewer asked Newman on another occasion.

“Not if you have to swallow eggs,”

was Paul’s response.

Paul Newman Ate 8 Eggs

George Kennedy estimated that Newman ultimately consumed about 8 eggs during filming of the scene:

“There were garbage cans just out of camera range.  My guess is that he consumed no more than eight or so, because as soon as the director yelled “cut,” he would relieve his mouth and throat of everything he could.”

According to Kennedy, what was most impressive about Paul’s performance in the egg eating scene was his ability to make his stomach look uncomfortably full, which Kennedy attributed to “muscle control”:

“He had the muscle control to ‘pop up’ his belly, on command.  Depending on what stage of the egg count he was at, he’d blow it up accordingly.  Nearing the end of the fifty eggs, you’d have sworn he had a muskmelon in there.  Nope.  But still, you didn’t want to be near when he belched.”

The biggest problem with the scene, Kennedy remembered, was a shortage of hard-boiled eggs.  Thanks to the actors’ insatiable appetites, most of the eggs, meant to be used over two days of filming, were eaten on day one.  To make up for the egg deficit, more eggs were boiled on the soundstage that night.  The resulting sulphuric smell on set the next day was unpleasant, to say the least.  As Kennedy shared:

“On day two, the smell of day-old hard-boiled eggs permeated everything.  Between shots, we all ran for the exits and didn’t come back inside until we’d stuffed tissues up our nostrils.  If Paul Newman ever complained, I never heard it.  But when Rosenberg called ‘That’s a wrap!’ on the second day, Paul was a blur getting out.  The crushing news was that we weren’t finished, and a third day in Smellorama was required.”

“A Guy in the Trenches Working”

From egg eating to working the swamp land and fields within twenty-five miles of the prison, to literally laying tar on the roads the actors work on the chain gang in the film, Paul Newman impressed the Cool Hand Luke cast and crew with his lack of star attitude.  Stuart Rosenberg remembered that:

“Paul was everyone’s favorite.  Not a superstar, but a guy in the trenches working.”

George Kennedy voiced similar observations in his autobiography:

“Paul Newman was a giant star when I worked with him in 1967.  I was deferential to him, but he pulled no star-power strings.  The man was a worker bee, and you can’t even imagine him being unprepared.”

Trouble with Donn Pearce

But one person on set was not enthralled with Paul Newman: Cool Hand Luke author Donn Pearce, who acted as consultant and played the small role of an inmate named Sailor in the film.  From the start, Pearce was unhappy with the casting of Newman.  He was still complaining as recently as 2011:

“They did a lousy job [with the film] and I disliked it intensely.  [Newman] was so cute looking.  He was too scrawny.  He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the road.”

There wasn’t much about the Cool Hand Luke filming experience for Donn Pearce to enjoy.  He felt shafted by Jack Lemmon when the producer made an appearance on set, and, despite the fact that it was Pearce’s book being made into a major Hollywood film, the convict stigma followed him: when a member of the cast locked his keys in his car, it was Pearce who was asked to find a way to get them out.  Such incidents might put Pearce’s punching of a fellow actor on the last day of shooting into perspective. (“Some of those actors…” was Pearce’s explanation for his behavior in a 2005 interview.)

Donn Pearce also took issue with the famous “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” line.  According to Pearce, the “stupid line” had too many syllables to have ever been uttered by the walking bosses he knew on the chain gang.  In interviews, Pearce was always quick to point out that the line was original to the film, and appeared nowhere in his book.  

Indeed, according to George Kennedy, it was thanks to Strother Martin’s delivery and omission of the “a” article that the line became so iconic:

“I don’t think anyone ever gave him permission to leave out the ‘a’ in that sentence.  It was just Strother being himself, and it made the reading an international catchphrase.  Strother was a brilliant innovator, and being a bit cuckoo for real didn’t hurt at all.”

Donn Pearce’s “Vanishing Folk Art”

Donn Pearce voiced his greatest dissatisfaction with Cool Hand Luke in a 1970 article he wrote for Esquire magazine.  In the article, Pearce complained that his biggest scene was ultimately cut from the film; a scene that would have allowed Pearce to demonstrate a rare skill he learned in prison: how to take off one’s pants while wearing ankle chains.  As Pearce wrote in the article:

“There were plenty of things I didn’t like about the movie version of my book, Cool Hand Luke…I was there on the set, acting as screenwriter, actor, and technical adviser and I was supposed to make sure that Paul Newman and the others walked around in chains the way real cons do.  Don’t think I didn’t scream about all the things that went wrong with the picture, but it did no good.  Meanwhile, my one real bit as an actor was a close-up of a Chain Man performing the nightly ritual of taking off his pants.  When I saw the flick, I discovered that mine was the ass on the cutting room floor.”

Though Pearce’s scene was cut from the film, the Esquire article did give him a chance to “instruct an upcoming generation in the ways of a vanishing folk art,” with 16 step by step photos of Pearce removing his pants while chained at the ankles.

Cool Hand Luke Car Wash Scene

With few exceptions, the Cool Hand Luke set was virtually devoid of women.  This was done purposefully by director Stuart Rosenberg, who believed the absence of women would help amplify the natural reactions of the actors when they shot the legendary car wash scene.  In the scene, the inmates are on roadside duty when they spot a beautiful young woman washing a car.  The young woman, named “Lucille” by Dragline, is the first female the inmates have seen in ages.  And they go crazy.  

For the part of Lucille, Stuart Rosenberg needed an actress who was not only stunningly beautiful, but also skilled: with no dialogue and a mere 3 minutes of screen time, Lucille must work the inmates into a frenzy with an overtly sensual car wash while still projecting enough innocence to keep George Kennedy’s Dragline convinced that Lucille is oblivious to her effect on the men.

Rosenberg found his Lucille in the beautiful Joy Harmon.  With her perfect figure, blonde mane, and striking blue eyes, Joy had already made a name for herself with memorable roles in countless television shows and films.  But it’s her performance in Cool Hand Luke’s iconic car wash scene for which Joy is best remembered.

In my interview with Joy, she recalled that both Stuart Rosenberg and Paul Newman were present for her audition, to which Joy wore a trench coat with a bikini underneath.  But it was her exceptionally blue eyes that Paul Newman noticed:

“Gosh, you have the bluest eyes,” Newman told her.

And with that, Joy had the role.

Rosenberg kept Joy away from the rest of cast until shooting of the car wash scene began.  When that day came, Joy remembered seeing “Paul Newman and the rest of the cast over the hill.”  And they remembered seeing her.  As Lou Antonio, who plays the inmate Koko in the film, recalled in a 2013 interview:

“Out came Joy Harmon with the camera on us, not on her.  So what you saw in the scene, we were seeing for the first time.  We didn’t have to act all all.  We had dialogue, but I don’t even know what I said…It was a sexy scene, but only because of all of our reactions to the performance, and the look of course, of what Joy was doing.”  

The Boston Globe film critic, Marjory Adams, praised Joy’s scene in the film, calling her performance “a masterpiece of woman’s inhumanity to men.”  Joy herself was surprised at the acclaim and attention both audiences and critics paid the car wash scene:

“I never had any inclination that this would be such a memorable role. Except for being in a movie with Paul Newman, I never expected this part to be so notable and get the reaction it did.”

Today, Joy Harmon is a mother of three and a grandmother of nine.  She runs a successful bakery, Aunt Joy’s Cakes, in Burbank, California, which caters to major Hollywood studios and countless television shows.  Joy remains genuinely surprised at the perennial popularity of her Cool Hand Luke car wash, which continues to rank among the most iconic scenes in cinema.

Read Part II of Cool Hand Luke

That’s it for Part I of Cool Hand Luke. Read Part II here.

Sources

Alsup, Benjamin (October 1, 2005). “This Was A Man.” Esquire. 

Author’s Interview with Cissy Wellman, October 12, 2024.

Author’s Interview with Joy Harmon, October 16, 2024.

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Crowther, Bosley (November 2, 1967).  “Screen: Forceful Portrait of a Man Born to Lose.” The New York Times. Vol. 117, no. 40, 094.

E.W. Kenworthy, “Paul Newman Drawing Crowds in McCarthy Indiana Campaign,” New York Times, April 22, 1968.

The Extraordinary Life on an Ordinary Man: a Memoir by Paul Newman, 2023.

Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema: Interviews with 20 Actresses from Biker, Beach, and Elvis Movies by Tom Lisanti, 2001. 

From Cheesecake to Cheesecake: The Joy Harmon Story (2013).

Paul Newman: A Biography by Eric Lax, 1996.

Paul Newman: A Life by Shawn Levy, 2009.

Paul Newman: A Life by Lawrence J. Quirk, 1996.

Paul Newman by Charles Hamblett, 1975.

Paul Newman by Daniel O’Brien, 2004.

Pearce, Donn (February, 1970). “How To Take Off Your Pants While Wearing Chains.” Esquire.

Saturday Evening Post, 24 February 1968.

Schickel, Richard (October 4, 1968). “Paul Newman’s Rachel, Rachel.” Life. 

Trust Me: A Memoir by George Kennedy, 2011.