YMMV / Cool Hand Luke

• Adaptation Displacement:
  • The film is considered a classic, but the novel is only remembered as the source material for the film.
  • The "tar sequence" background music has become so recognizable as a TV news jingle (particularly within Australia) that it's quite jarring to hear in a completely unrelated context.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • With regards to Luke's final escape attempt — was it a spur-of-the-moment thing, as he claims later? Or was it a form of Suicide by Cop? Especially since he'd been threatened with death if he tried escaping again.
  • Luke's in-universe status as a messianic figure seems to be more a case of Dragline projecting his own imaginations and fantasies onto a man he knows very little about. Dragline has an established love of letting his imagination run away with him after all. And on the flipside, Luke doesn't seem to have much direction in the gang until Dragline starts propping him up as 'his boy'. Perhaps being Dragline's pseudo-messiah gives Luke something to live for that he didn't have beforehand?
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Columbia passed on making the film, having just lost a lot of money on their POW picture King Rat, which no one went to see. They were also not keen on the fact that the lead character dies at the end.
• Award Snub:
  • Paul Newman lost out the Best Actor Academy Award to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night. While the latter is a good film and Steiger is good in it, Newman's Luke ended up being the more memorable and iconic role as the years went on.
  • The film wasn't nominated for Best Picture or Director.
• Awesome Music: The famous "tar sequence", which would actually be used for many years as intro music for TV newscasts, primarily on ABC owned-and-operated stations in the US and the Nine Network in Australia, with the latter continuing to use it to this day.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Some critics thought the film made working on a chain gang seem quite appealing.
• Fanon: Joy Harmon's character is nicknamed Lucille in the film, but her real name is not revealed, and she's just credited as 'The Girl'. Lucille is taken as her Canon Name.
• Fetish Retardant: The shirtlessness stops being titillating as the film goes on and you see how overworked the guys are. They also have to strip naked before going into The Box.
• Funny Moments: The prisoners ogling the woman washing her car.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One of the guards in the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment claimed to have been imitating the guards from this movie.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Strother Martin plays a tyrannical prison guard and George Kennedy plays a victimized prisoner four years before reversing that dynamic with their performances in Fools' Parade.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "What we've got here is (a) failure to communicate."
  • The 50 eggs in an hour and derivative bets have become a memetic contest.
• Moment of Awesome: Pretty much everything Luke does. Dragline gets one when he attacks Godfrey and knocks off his glasses after he shoots Luke.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Joy Harmon appears for five minutes in a Fanservicey scene of a girl washing her car while the men watch.
  • Jo Van Fleet has one extended scene as Luke's mother. It's one of the more emotional parts of the movie.
• Retroactive Recognition: A virtual Who's Who of soon-to-be-famous character actors appear as prisoners, including Dennis Hopper (Babalugats), Harry Dean Stanton (Tramp), Wayne Rogers (Gambler), Ralph Waite (Alibi), Anthony Zerbe (Dog Boy), J. D. Cannon (Society Red), and Joe Don Baker (Fixer).
• Signature Scene: The "Night in the box" speech and the "I can eat fifty eggs in an hour" scene.
• Stoic Woobie: Luke appears to be a Shell-Shocked Veteran who doesn't know what to do with his life. His mother is dying and passes away during the film, and it's implied he had a tense relationship with his brother John. And of course all the abuse he suffers in the chain gang. You wouldn't know it though, as he just keeps on smiling. He proves Not So Stoic in the third act.
• Tear Jerker: After Luke's final conversation with his mother — during which she casually reveals she's dying — he has a brief exchange with his brother John. Their only words are John tossing him a banjo and saying he has nothing left to come back home for now.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Besides Dragline, none of the other inmates get many lines or development.

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