Against Authority
aul Newman’s eponymous character in Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) is one of the most iconic in cinema, his radiant smile testifying to his ability to endure almost-inhuman hardship with good humour and grace. Newman’s Luke Jackson is an alienated young man who chafes against the authoritarian impulses of his institutional overseers after a seemingly innocuous act of property damage sees him sentenced to hard labour in the American South. Released at a moment of sociocultural turmoil in the United States, the film uses its ambiguous historical setting to comment on the politics of the day. Its central themes of institutionalisation, dehumanisation, authoritarianism and the nobility of self-sacrifice take on heightened significance in the surrounding historical context of the Vietnam War, the African-American civil rights movement and US counterculture. The film evokes these themes indirectly, relating them to earlier traditions by invoking a range of biblical images. Cool Hand Luke is also an industrially significant film, incorporating many of the stylistic and thematic hallmarks that, following the success of The Graduate (Mike Nichols) and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn) in the same year, would soon be codified in the youth-centric films of the New Hollywood era.
emerged from inauspicious origins: a 1965 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Donn Pearce, a former merchant seaman who based his literary debut on his own experiences in a prison chain gang in Florida. Jack Lemmon’s Jalem production company bought the rights to Pearce’s novel, and, after several setbacks, production got underway for Warner Bros., with Newman attached as lead and Stockton, California, standing in for the novel’s Florida setting. Newman came to the film as an established star, having played iconoclastic outsiders such as an overconfident pool (Robert Rossen, 1961), a disaffected cowpoke in (Martin Ritt, 1963), an existentially anguished ‘Billy the Kid’ in (Penn, 1958) and a white gunslinger who faces discrimination over his Apache upbringing in (Martin Ritt, 1967). was the third feature-film credit for Rosenberg, who had already had a lengthy career directing episodes of hard-boiled television programs including and . In making the transition from television direction to feature film-making, Rosenberg mirrored the career trajectory of fellow New Hollywood directors Penn, Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah – a representation of a more widespread generational change in the US film industry.
