Paul Newman (Cool Hand Luke), Steve McQueen

Cool Hand Luke, directed by Stuart Rosenberg in 1967, is maybe the most iconic role of Paul Newman as Lucas Jackson, a veteran of World War II. Luke has just committed a petty crime and is subsequently sentenced to the brutal punishment of a prison chain gang in the oppressive rural regions of Central Florida. The danger that Luke poses—one could argue like Jesus did returning to Nazareth—is that he sees completely through the game. He sees that the whole established order is built upon the absurd notion that human beings are enslaved by some kind of paternally malignant "God", and that taking this position allows humans to rationalize their exploitation, control, and destruction of other human beings. According to Albert Camus, the world is not in itself absurd; life becomes absurd due to the incompatibility between human beings and the world they inhabit. 

Maybe the central theme of Cool Hand Luke is the cruelty of man’s will for power over his fellow man. In the attempt to gain power, one must not only mislead others into “Laws of God and Nature”, but he must also lie to himself for misleading the rest. The chains the prisoners wear are symbolic of the chains that our civilization itself puts on the individual. "Everywhere man is born free and everywhere he is in chains," as the French philosopher Rousseau put it. He also says in his political treatise, The Social Contract, “Show me where I wrote my signature on the contract agreeing to accept the laws and dictates of my fellow man”. Luke is an enigma at first to the powers that be, after destroying municipal property, a rather ridiculous crime. “Ripping the heads off parking meters”, Luke tells the Captain, who replies, “We never had one of those before.” The Captain becomes even more puzzled when he reads Luke’s war record, where he was decorated with medals. Even the prisoners have a pecking order, with Dragline (played in an academy-award winning performance by George Kennedy) is top dog on the chain. “You don’t have a name until Dragline gives you one”, another inmate (ironically named ‘Society’) tells the new inmate.

Luke is on a collision course with the established order, first with Dragline, who beats him mercilessly in the Saturday boxing ring made for inmates to settle grudges. Luke is a man whose nature is to be free and he can not change that fact, and he keeps rising with every punch. “You will have to kill me”, he tells Dragline, and consequently earns the respect of the inmates but raises the radar of the bosses, who intuitively understand that Luke is an existential threat to their authority by making that declaration. When Luke answers the punitive measures of the Captain with sarcasm and is cane-whipped, the Captain (Strother Martin) replies with one of the most famous movie quotes of all time: “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. That line struck a chord in America, especially at a time when the gap between generations was growing and the traditional structure of society was unraveling. The line signified, on a deeper level, the alienation of man (and woman) from one another. Here in Cool Hand Luke these are all men (prisoners and guards alike) who are mimicking a game on the micro level that is also being played on the macro societal level.

Luke is the only one who can see that Western civilization became fundamentally absurd the moment that atomic bombs were thrown on other human beings. Robert Oppenheimer, chief engineer on The Manhattan Project once remarked after completing his task, "it's perfectly obvious that the entire world is going to Hell, and the only way we can possibly prevent this is by doing nothing." It is no accident that the emergence of existentialism coincided with the end of the second great world tragedy, just as in the visual arts the surrealist and dada movement came out of the first world tragedy. How can man do such unspeakable crimes to man? What is it that drives man to throw out rationality and reason, not to mention the emotional empathy and compassion, for the sake of murder? These are not easy questions to answer. Philosophy and psychology are fields of study which can explore the reasons, but if they are honest in their practicality, they recognize their impotence in finding a solution to the question of “why?” I think it is only art, the field that seeks to find answers through the negation of that which has been rigidly structured into binded patterns of the mind, that can break open the hard shell of the absurd state of existence in which we find ourselves. 

Paul Newman as Luke is the Everyman. Like Jake Gittes in Chinatown battling the entire bureaucracy of Los Angeles, Luke is engaged in a losing fight. As isolated as Christ, he must ultimately be sacrificed. It is clear that Rosenberg has purposely chosen the Christ motif to affirm this point. Luke lies prostrate with his arms stretched as if on a cross when he accomplishes the impossible (“No one can eat 50 eggs”), and the scene where he tells the others to “stop feeding off me!” is reminiscent of Christ in the Garden of Gethsmane, Christ already in spirit moving beyond the body. The final frame pans away from the road where the inmates are sharing tales of their savior, and the roads from which they toil form a cross. Although the other inmates are incapable of the courage to be so free in spirit, they are redeemed by the example of Luke. Even his prison number (37) is a reference to a higher spiritual cause. Luke 1:37: “For with God nothing shall be impossible." Luke the Existentialist is pointing this out to all of us. The philosopher Alan Watts (author of Myth & Ritual in Christianity) remarked: "I have often contemplated the stars in the heavens and wondered if at one time they were also planets which became self-aware and in an atomic blaze of glory blew themselves up, spewing debris into the fields around them which eventually formed new planets, and so the game goes throughout this particular universe. The secret of life is knowing when to stop." 

At Paul Newman’s forty-fourth birthday party—held at his Benedict Canyon house—Robert Stone (author of A Hall of Mirrors/WUSA) and his wife Janice (Mattson) met Anthony Perkins, Cloris Leachman, and Jay Sebring, a celebrity hairstylist who would be murdered by the Manson Family in the doomed house on Cielo Drive, in August 1969. The WUSA's producer John Foreman introduced Janice as a character from Stone’s novel and script—“the real Geraldine.” Maybe Foreman was stoned at the time. Robert and Janice Stone were surprised that dope-smoking was as prevalent in Hollywood as in other places they’d recently been, though Newman and Woodward didn’t indulge in it. Newman had a pool table in his home, where he also liked to cook for guests; he taught Janice how to eat an artichoke leaf by leaf.

As for the lifting of conventional constraints on the movie business, Stone’s feelings were mixed, more on the negative side. “I thought liberation from the failing grip of the censors did not seem to be making pictures any better. In fact, it seemed increasingly permissible to trivialize on a more complex level, and to employ obviousness in treating stories whose point was their ambiguity.” That was a bad augury for Stone’s film adaptation of A Hall of Mirrors. Stone’s first conversations with the director Stuart Rosenberg were enough to let him know “that we had very little in common in terms of the stories we wanted to tell.” Janice also mistrusted Rosenberg and she even thought his recent picture with Newman, the iconic Cool Hand Luke, had been a failure, at odds with the audience that shelled out $16 millions. 

The critic Pauline Kael, in her review of Slapshot, asserted: "Paul Newman is an actor-star in the way that Bogart was. His range isn't enormous; he can't do classics, any more than Bogart could. But when a role is right for him, he's peerless." Although I'm not sold on her Bogart-Newman analogy, I tend to accept that Newman defined a sort of damaged masculinity far better than the fellow actors of his time. “Nobody should be asked not to like Paul Newman,” Kael suggested. The director John Huston went further, calling Newman “a moral and ethical man. Superb in every way.” And many would agree.

Along with Paul Newman and Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen was the biggest of the young male movie stars of the sixties. The UK had its share of exciting young leading men like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, and Terence Stamp, but of the young sexy guys in America—that were also genuine movie stars—we had Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Warren Beatty. On the next level down: James Garner, James Coburn, and George Peppard. James Garner was actually popular enough to get scripts from time to time that weren’t covered by the top three, but not often. Once McQueen became a movie star with The Great Escape, he made a string of pretty good movies. In the sixties the only real dud in his filmography is Baby the Rain Must Fall. And that’s mostly due to the ridiculous sight of Steve trying to play a folk singer. Whereas Paul Newman for his whole career did a considerable amount of low-profile movies along with some iconic ones. I mean, some of the movies Newman agreed to do over the years are really baffling. When I was writing my adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch (which I retitled Jackie Brown), and I had to consider who was to play the novel’s likable lead male Max Cherry, I had a few choices. Gene Hackman was an obvious choice, as was Paul Newman. I also considered John Saxon. But there was something about Robert Forster in Alligator that really stuck with me. So I started writing the script right down to the discussion with Jackie about Max's thinning hair.

In real life everything suggests Steve McQueen could be a real hothead. In Don Siegel’s autobiography he relates that a few times during the making of Hell Is for Heroes the two men almost came to blows. Apparently McQueen and his costar on that film, Bobby Darin, also couldn’t stand each other. When actor/writer James Bacon once mentioned to Darin that McQueen was his own worst enemy, Darin replied, “Not while I’m alive.” But McQueen’s Lt. Frank Bullitt is no hothead. He is the epitome of cool. Paul Newman's kind of cool was different from McQueen, a more reserved kind. Oddly, actress Lita Milan had brief flings in the same year 1958 with both Paul Newman (co-star in The Left-Handed Gun) and with Steve McQueen while filming Never Love a Stranger (directed by Robert Stevens).

Lee Remick also had a brief affair with McQueen while filming Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) and allegedly she had appeared interested in Newman while she played Eula in The Long, Hot Summer (1958). Of course, Newman ignored Remick as he'd go on to shrug off other of his co-stars' advances. One of the key differences, besides their acting styles between Newman and McQueen, is that Newman was only macho onscreen. Offscreen he was much more progressive and left-leaning than the womanizer and Republican McQueen.

Former MCA Producer Jennings Lang offered the role of Dirty Harry to Paul Newman (probably sometime soon after Harper). But Newman turned it down. According to Lang, “Newman said he thought it was too tough a role, that he couldn’t play that type of character.” Universal sold the script by Harry Julian Fink and R. M. Fink to Warner Bros., where it was going to be made with Frank Sinatra playing Harry and directed by Irv Kirshner. Then Sinatra sprained his wrist, seriously limiting his ability to wield Callahan’s .44 Magnum. Warner offered it to Clint Eastwood, who agreed on the condition that he could bring Don Siegel over from Universal to direct. It was also Siegel’s most political film since his earlier masterpiece, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. With Body Snatchers, the liberal-leaning Siegel was able to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand, it can be read as a subtextual attack on McCarthyism (its most popular reading). But on the other hand, the film also plays into the Red Nightmare paranoia of the fifties, being the communists referred as The Pod People. In many of Siegel’s stories working for producers and studio executives he didn’t respect, the director referred to them as 'Pod People'. 

But in the seventies cop thriller, the subtextual attack is of a much different political bent. Dirty Harry tells the story of the quintessential Siegel protagonist taken to its logical extreme. Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is the baddest-ass cop on the San Francisco police force. In a different era he’d be portrayed as a by-the-book type. Except in the era and location the movie takes place (San Francisco in the early seventies), in Callahan’s opinion, the book has been rewritten in favor of the scum. Society is screaming police brutality. The public is siding with the crooks. And the gutless police brass, local government, and the courts are cowed into compliance with an increasingly permissive social order that favors lawbreakers over law enforcement. The genius of the film is it takes that transgressive character and pits him up against a fictionalized version of San Francisco’s real-life “Zodiac Killer” (this fictionalized “Scorpio” is another calculating mastermind). 

Master bank robber Doc McCoy, who’s just served four years in prison, is given parole in exchange for orchestrating a robbery for a local bigwig named Beynon (played in the movie by Ben Johnson), who sits on the parole board. The deal is brokered by McCoy’s robbery accomplice wife, Carol (it’s inferred in the movie it was her mistake that put Doc behind bars). The Getaway was put into production during a serious time of transition in Steve McQueen’s life. He and his wife, friend, and confidant Neile McQueen were finalizing their divorce. Steve had moved out of their Malibu home and taken up residence at the Chateau Marmont. After passing at the last minute on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (due to his rivalry with Paul Newman), McQueen embarked on three offbeat projects that all ended in failure. Who would play the female colead, Carol McCoy? Robert Evans had been aggressively pushing the idea of a teaming between his wife Ali MacGraw, and Steve McQueen. In retrospect, this is ironic, because it would be while she was making The Getaway she would leave the mogul and marry her costar Steve McQueen. I asked Walter Hill who he thought would have made a good Carol McCoy. He said he had favored Stella Stevens, but McQueen didn't want Stevens, he wanted Ali MacGraw. Hill said the actresses that got the most consideration were Lauren Hutton and Geneviève Bujold. But that idea ended up blowing up when McQueen waited in a bar to meet Bujold to discuss the film, and she came walking in with Maximilian Schell. Neile (ex-wife of McQueen) had decided to retaliate by having an affair with Max Schell. So when Geneviève Bujold walked through the barroom doorway with the man who screwed his wife, McQueen got distracted and proceeded to beat the living shit outta Maximilian Schell.

For Sam Peckinpah, Carol bedding Beynon was very important in the context of the story. For first time viewers it’s easy to assume, to get her man out of Huntsville, she was forced against her will into the sexual bargain. But Peckinpah decidedly does not dramatize it that way. The film insinuates she was not just willing to do it for Doc; she was willing to do it for Beynon. It even tries to insinuate that Carol has to debate her choice of which man to stay with. And in the confrontation scene where Carol shoots Beynon, the movie tries to convince us that maybe Carol is in league with the Texas power broker against her husband. Later Doc accuses her, “I think you liked it. I think he got to you.” Carol answers Doc back, “Maybe I got to him.” If Beynon wasn’t played by Ben Johnson, this whole three-way sexual dynamic could have worked. It’s not just you can’t imagine Ben Johnson having sex with Ali MacGraw, you can’t imagine Ben Johnson having sex. No less Ali MacGraw’s Carol seriously considering leaving Steve McQueen’s Doc for Ben Johnson’s Beynon. This whole subplot could have been far more effective if Beynon had been played by somebody a little closer to McQueen. Joe Don Baker would have been the fantastic natural choice. But I can also see Robert Culp or Stuart Whitman delivering what was required to make the triangle dynamic work.

“The Getaway was the last time Steve was in a movie as ‘the Steve McQueen’ we liked to see,” Walter Hill stated. “He did a few other movies and he did good performances, but that special quality that made Steve—‘Steve’—was really never on display again.” And I agree with Hill. I don’t even see The Getaway as a crime thriller about a pair of on-the-lam robbers, with a massive manhunt coming from both sides hot on their trail. I now realize what Peckinpah made and what McQueen and McGraw performed was a love story. The crime story is literal. The love story is metaphorical. Nevertheless, when it comes to Peckinpah fans, Steve McQueen fans, the one thing everybody seemed to agree on is that in the role of Carol McCoy, Ali MacGraw was lousy. And for the last forty years, I too was one of those Ali MacGraw bashers. That is until recently. It took me over forty years, but now I see Ali MacGraw’s performance differently. First off, let me start by saying, she’s not the Carol McCoy of the book or Walter Hill’s screenplay. If you want that Carol, then nothing is going to replace Peckinpah’s first choice of Stella Stevens (except possibly Linda Haynes). No, MacGraw’s Carol might not be one-half of the greatest bank robbing couple in crime film literature. But instead she is one-half of one of the greatest love stories in crime film cinema.

While she doesn’t offer the characterization of a professional armed robber, she does offer up the minute by minute, scene by scene, emotional reality of a woman trying to keep a relationship from crumbling into pieces. The couple pass through a physical and emotional gauntlet, and lurch from one catastrophe to another. While McQueen alternates between keeping his cool and losing his cool, Carol feels, Carol hurts, Carol is afraid. She’s heartbreaking and heartbroken when she loses the suitcase full of loot to Richard Bright’s cowboy con man thief. She waits there in the train station for Doc, not knowing for sure if he’s going to return, in utter despair. "Did I blow it? Did I just ruin everything? How could I be so stupid?" It’s my feeling that Ali MacGraw’s moment to moment work in this film is sensational. In real life she was living through everything that she was hired to portray as Carol. Carol with Beynon—MacGraw with her husband Robert Evans. She’s a woman having to deal with a very difficult, mercurial, masculine man amidst a grueling endeavor. Carol on the lam with Doc—MacGraw making this incredibly difficult movie with McQueen and Peckinpah. She’s a woman in love—so was MacGraw. When the film came out in the States and England, MacGraw was roasted by the critics. Everywhere,  except in France. From the very beginning, the French always saw the film as a love story. And in France the critics praised the emotional content of McGraw's performance.

While the couple rests in that torn apart Volkswagen bug at the garbage dump, Carol threatens to “split.” If Carol loses faith, all is lost. It’s Doc’s savvy and survival prowess that keeps them from getting caught. It keeps them getting a little further down the road. But it’s Carol that keeps them together. It’s Carol that saves Doc from his self-destructive impulses. It’s Carol that knows if they don’t make it together . . . they don’t make it. If she throws in the towel, it was truly all for nothing. Until Doc can not only forgive her for Beynon, but trust completely that she did it for the right reason, he’s still in Huntsville. Finally, Doc comes to this realization. But Carol demands from her husband, “No matter what ever else happens, no more about him.” And he agrees, “No matter whatever else happens—no more about him.” And the two finally are reunited. Walking together, one arm draped around her, holding her close. His other arm carrying the pump-action shotgun he stole from the sporting goods store. Backed by a sea of garbage, those terrible trash-eating birds flying around in the sky, and the dump trucks moving mountains of trash, yet for the first time in the movie we know they’re going to be alright. “Whatever else happens.” —Cinema Speculation (2022) by Quentin Tarantino