Reflections on the Spirit of Resistance

Paul Newman’s 1967 film Cool Hand Luke resides at the apex of journeyman director Stuart Rosenberg’s career, the fullest flowering of his skills, representing on the screen a fundamental story. The film assumed only some of the cultural cache of that same year’s Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn, or Mike Nichol’s The Graduate (or 1970’s MASH, by Robert Altman) all of which delivered greater cinematic inventiveness or subversive comic brio to speak to the 1960’s counter-cultural uprising. But Cool Hand Luke has nonetheless lived on as an iconic expression of the essential spirit of the time – resistance to oppression – though by virtue of its essential nature, it addressed itself specifically to none of the issues of the day, neither cultural conformity, nor state power, nor racial subjugation.

Under Rosenberg’s experienced hand, a host of pre-stardom actors joined Newman in giving on-the-mark performances as varied chain-gang characters, and in deliverance of what would become …