Cool Hand Luke (1967)
A movie famous as an anti-establishment send-up and for the charming, smiling Paul Newman. Worth seeing for either reason. It does have comic moments to talk about--egg eating among them--and it has an especially low point for the treatment of women, even though it is justified internally by the characters. Most of the time it's a well paced, well acted chain gang movie, with one getaway (that's no spoiler--all prison movies have getaways) that is an homage or ripoff of the 1932 LeRoy chain gang movie to beat all chain gang movies.
Because the movie is clearly set in the past, it doesn't indict the prison system directly, but does critique the problem of authority, and of what exactly is a punishment suitable for petty crime. I don't know if the title character (played by Newman) is an anti-hero exactly (he lacks any true badness) but there is no doubt by halfway through who the true good guy is. And by the end, the Christian symbolism is overwhelming. If Cool Hand Luke the man isn't quite what you think of as messianic, he still does at least show what it means to be good in very ungood circumstances. It's a complicated thing to be a hero, and to survive those who are threatened by those better than them, and in the end, that's what the movie is about. Compelling if never amazing, and most of all enjoyable.
A movie famous as an anti-establishment send-up and for the charming, smiling Paul Newman. Worth seeing for either reason. It does have comic moments to talk about--egg eating among them--and it has an especially low point for the treatment of women, even though it is justified internally by the characters. Most of the time it's a well paced, well acted chain gang movie, with one getaway (that's no spoiler--all prison movies have getaways) that is an homage or ripoff of the 1932 LeRoy chain gang movie to beat all chain gang movies.
Because the movie is clearly set in the past, it doesn't indict the prison system directly, but does critique the problem of authority, and of what exactly is a punishment suitable for petty crime. I don't know if the title character (played by Newman) is an anti-hero exactly (he lacks any true badness) but there is no doubt by halfway through who the true good guy is. And by the end, the Christian symbolism is overwhelming. If Cool Hand Luke the man isn't quite what you think of as messianic, he still does at least show what it means to be good in very ungood circumstances. It's a complicated thing to be a hero, and to survive those who are threatened by those better than them, and in the end, that's what the movie is about. Compelling if never amazing, and most of all enjoyable.