Cool Hand Luke

Cool Hand Luke opened on November 1, 1967, at Loew's State Theatre in New York City. The proceeds of the premiere went to charities. The film was a box-office success, grossing $16,217,773 in domestic screenings. Variety called Newman's performance "excellent" and the supporting cast "versatile and competent". The New York Times praised the film, remarking Pearce and Pierson's "sharp script", Rosenberg's "ruthlessly realistic and plausible" staging and direction and Newman's "splendid" performance with an "unfaultable" cast that "elevates" it among other prison films. Kennedy's portrayal was considered "powerfully obsessive" and the actors' playing the prison staff, "blood-chilling". The New York Daily News gave Cool Hand Luke three-and-a-half stars. Reviewer Ann Guarino noted that the film was based on Pearce's experience working with a chain gang and added, "if the cruelties depicted are true, the film should encourage reforms". Guarino called Newman's acting "excellent" and "charming and likeable", and wrote that "humor is supplied" by Kennedy. She wrote that Arletta was "played outstandingly" by van Fleet, that Martin was "effective" as the warden and that the rest of the cast "do well in their roles". For The Boston Globe, Marjory Adams noted that Cool Hand Luke "hits hard, spares no punches, deals with rough, sadistic and unhappy men". The review deemed Newman "tremendously effective", and his portrayal "played with perceptiveness, honesty and compassion". Adams pointed out that "Kennedy stands out as unofficial leader of the convicts", she called van Fleet's role "short but poignant" and Harmon's appearance "a masterpiece of woman's inhumanity to men". According to Adams, the direction by Rosenberg was "sharp, discerning and realistic". For the Chicago Tribune, Clifford Terry wrote that the film "works beautifully", adding that it is "sharp, absorbing, extremely entertaining". Terry remarked on Newman's "usual competent performance" and the "strong support of the cast", and praised Kennedy, Martin, Askew and Woodward. Van Fleet's acting was deemed "masterfully played". Rosenberg's direction was called "diverse" in its "exploration of moods". Terry opined that the "believable, tuned-in dialog" by Pierson and Person and Conrad Hall's "sun-centered photography" created a "great feeling of the southern discomfort". He felt that "the final 10 minutes" that featured Luke's monologue "almost destroy the preceding 110", with the "unlikely" monologue and the "artsy camera shot" of the breaking of the "hating overseer's sunglasses" contributing to the scene's "awkward artificiality". But "everything else works", Terry wrote. For the Los Angeles Times, reviewer Charles Champlin called the film "remarkably interesting and impressive". He wrote that Cool Hand Luke "has its flaws" that "mar an otherwise special achievement", but that "it still remains an achievement". He felt that the film was a "triumph" for Newman. Champlin deemed the scene featuring van Fleet a "stunning piece of writing and acting". He called the roles of the prison staff "triumphantly hateable" and Kennedy "superb". He called the sequence with Harmon "a scene of cruel sexuality" and Schifrin's music "lonely and hunting". Champlin felt that Newman's end monologue was "stagey, sentimental and redundant". He added that Cool Hand Luke "played at the level of observable reality" and that "the intrusion of cinematic artifice seems wholly wrong". He wrote that the filmmakers "had not reckoned their own strength at making their symbolic points" but that the result was "a picture with riveting impact". Time wrote that "the beauty comes from the careful building of the individuals' characters". Its review said that Rosenberg "tells the story simply and directly", while lamenting the "anti-climatic", "unfortunate montages" at the end of the film. The St. Louis Dispatch praised Kennedy's acting as "raw realism in a fine performance" and Rosenberg's work as "above the cut of the ordinary chain-gang motion picture". The review praised the "fluid camera, working in for telling expressions" that made the prisoners "merge as varied and interesting individuals". The Austin American-Statesman called the film "absorbing, well-thought-out". The script was deemed "taut and deftly honed, flavored by humor and perceptive accents" and Rosenberg's direction "smoothly flowing as it is brutally realistic and occasionally raw". Newman's performance was hailed as "sureness as style that is totally convincing"; the review concluded that the film "can be appreciated on any level".

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 100% of 56 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.8/10. The website's consensus reads: "Though hampered by Stuart Rosenberg's direction, Cool Hand Luke is held aloft by a stellar script and one of Paul Newman's most indelible performances." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 92 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Empire rated it five stars out of five, declaring the movie one of Newman's best performances. Slant rated the film three stars out of four. It described Newman's role as "iconic", also praising its cinematography and sound score. Allmovie praised Newman's performance as "one of the most indelible anti-authoritarian heroes in movie history". Roger Ebert included the film in his review collection The Great Movies, rating it four stars out of four. He called it a "great" film and also an anti-establishment one during the Vietnam War. He believed the film was a product of its time and that no major film company would be interested in producing a film of such "physical punishment, psychological cruelty, hopelessness and equal parts of sadism and masochism" today. He praised the cinematography, capturing the "punishing heat" of the location, and stated that "the physical presence of Paul Newman is the reason this movie works: The smile, the innocent blue eyes, the lack of strutting", which no other actor could have produced as effectively. Newman's biographer Lawrence J. Quirk considered it one of Newman's weaker performances, writing, "For once, even Newman's famed charisma fails him, for in Cool Hand Luke he completely lacks the charm that, say, Al Pacino in Scarecrow effortlessly exhibits when he plays a screw-up who also winds up (briefly) incarcerated." Quirk added that Newman's performance was stronger in the second half: "to be fair to Newman, he was trying his damnedest to play an impossible part, since Luke is a convict's rationalization fantasy and never a real character". Some authors have criticized the film's depiction of prison life at the time. In a review called "Sheer Beauty in the Wrong Place", Life, while praising the film's photography, criticized the influence of the visual styles in the depictions of the prison camp. The magazine declared that the landscapes turned it into "a rest camp [in which] the men are getting plenty of sleep, food and healthy outdoor exercise", and that despite the presence of the guards, it showed that there were "worse ways to pay one's debt with society". Ron Clooney also remarked that prisons "were not hotels and certainly not the stuff of Cool Hand Luke movies".