The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Stuart Rosenberg · a film · 1967 · about 126 minutes · written by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson, from Pearce’s novel of 1965
Mode
The American prison picture as a passion play; a star vehicle that kills its star, comedy and martyrdom under one law
Mythos
The Christ of a gang of men, with a Peter who fights him, follows him and hands him over; the trickster and the stoic whose one weapon is refusal
Phase
A sentence on a road gang, from arrival through a run of feats and three escapes to a death in a church, and a coda in which the death is already a legend
Presentation
Feature film in colour and Panavision, about 126 minutes, in English; one camp, its roads, a swamp and a church; one star at the centre of an ensemble of convicts and bosses
Register
From broad comedy among sweating men to a talk with God in an empty church; heat, dust and white sky, with a boss’s mirrored glasses watching
Scale
One camp of men and its keepers, a mother’s visit, a telegram, a church, and the legend the men carry out onto the road
Governing Proposition
A man sentenced to a road prison for cutting the heads off parking meters will not consent to it, and escapes three times, each time at a higher cost. The wager of the film is that a closed institution must break the one man who refuses it, and that the men it holds need him not to break, so that the refuser is consumed twice: by the bosses who kill him, and by the gang who make a saint of him and will not let him be a man.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a drunk man at night cutting the heads off parking meters. It is Luke Jackson’s whole offence, a drunk’s act of vandalism, and he will not say why he did it. The prologue gives him no cause and the film never supplies one. He arrives at a rural road prison with a record of war medals the film mentions and leaves unexplored, and is read the camp’s rules. The institution is not unjust in any way a reform could mend. It is simply a place that requires consent, and Luke is a man who will not give it.
Stuart Rosenberg directed the film for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, and it was released in 1967, in colour and Panavision, at about 126 minutes. Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson wrote the screenplay from Pearce’s novel of 1965. Conrad Hall photographed it, Sam O’Steen edited it, and Lalo Schifrin wrote the music. Paul Newman plays Luke; George Kennedy plays Dragline, and won the Academy Award for supporting actor for it; Strother Martin plays the Captain, Jo Van Fleet Luke’s mother Arletta, and Morgan Woodward Boss Godfrey, whose mirrored glasses watch the gang.
The inheritance is the American prison picture, with I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) behind it, and the rebel hero of the 1950s, a figure Newman had himself played. The film turns from both. Its hero has no grievance to redress and no innocence to prove; it refuses the escape picture’s payoff and kills its star; and it lays a religious figure across a star vehicle for a major studio. The stake is lower than the turn. It is a studio picture built on a star at the height of his draw, from a novel, and classical in form throughout. The Graduate, of the same year and at 8.1, took larger risks with tone and form; this film places the antihero of its moment on a proven path.
Movement II
The camp tests the newcomer, and the film becomes a run of trials. Dragline fights him in a boxing match, and Luke, beaten, will not stay down. At poker Luke wins a pot on nothing, and explains that nothing can be “a real cool hand”. The bluff names him, and it names the end: in the last scene, too, there is nothing in the hand, and it is his whole stake. Dragline, who began as his enemy, becomes the first of his followers.
The tarring of the road is the film’s purest lift. Luke drives the gang into a frenzy of work, shovelling and spreading in the heat, until the stretch is finished early and the men sit idle in the sun, not knowing what to do with what they have won. O’Steen cuts it to Schifrin’s music in a comic rhythm that never loses the menace of the guns at the edge of frame. Hall photographs heat, dust, sweat and a white sky, and in the corner of the shot, Godfrey’s mirrored glasses: the man with no eyes, the law as a gaze that does not speak.
Then the eggs. Luke bets that he can eat fifty boiled eggs, and the men bet on him. He does it, and is laid out on the table afterwards, arms spread and belly swollen, grotesque and solemn at once, a cruciform body for the men who bet on him. The image tells the viewer what the film intends, and the Christ pattern is pressed by pose and composition rather than discovered beneath the story. The sequence makes its point and then repeats it, as the car wash scene before it, in which the men watch a girl soap a car, makes one point about deprivation and lingers past it. Much of the middle of the film is like this: a run of feats any one of which might go.
Movement III
Luke’s mother visits him once, dying, with his brother and a nephew, and after the visit the spine of the film is set. When the telegram comes with word of her death, Luke sits on his bunk with a banjo and sings “Plastic Jesus”: grief held under a joke, the warmest moment in the film. Then comes the box, and then he runs, and the punishment that follows each recapture is harsher than the one before it: chains after the first escape, and after the second the ditch, dug and filled.
The ladder is the form of a will tested to the end. Three escapes are not a repetition but a sequence, and the repetition is part of what the film knows: the viewer comes to want Luke to run again, as the men do, and so shares the hunger that consumes him. Through it all the Captain speaks of punishment in the voice of care, a softness Strother Martin makes frightening. Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows; but the episodes of camp life around the ladder are filled with incident in the manner of the genre, and they are the container of the knowledge rather than its instrument.
After the ditch Luke breaks, or seems to, and begs the men to stop needing him. They turn on him for failing them. It is the film’s plainest statement of what it has found: the confined need the refuser not to break, and their need consumes him as surely as the bosses do. That can be stated, and it holds. The film draws it as allegory more than as mechanism: the prison’s economy, the state that sends men to it, the society that fills it and Luke’s own motive are left blank, the last by design. The condition is shown and its causes are not articulated.
Movement IV
Luke runs a third time, and Dragline runs with him. Luke comes at night to an empty country church, where he speaks to God and hears nothing. Hall lights it through the window, cold, and the silence of God answers the silence of the bosses who never speak. It is the coldest of the film’s summits. Then car lights fill the window. Dragline has led the bosses to him, and Luke goes to the window and returns the Captain’s own words about a “failure to communicate”. He is shot.
One law governs the film from the eggs to the church: the man who will not yield is watched, by the men who need him and the bosses who must break him, and above them by a silence he addresses and that does not reply. The fight in which he will not stay down, the box, the ditch and the escapes all obey it, and the range it covers is wide for a prison picture, from broad comedy to a death in a church. It strains in places. The car wash belongs to a cruder film, the mother’s visit sits apart in tone, and the Christ imagery is at points laid over the law rather than issuing from it.
Dragline is Peter to Luke’s Christ: he fights him, follows him, and hands him over, and George Kennedy makes him the performance of the film, the man who needs a hero. Newman carries the whole on a smile that is defiance, charm and despair by turns, and on return it reads differently once the end is known. Whether the last talk with God is faith or despair, the film does not say. Between the set pieces the direction is sound rather than inspired, the zooms are of their year, the symbolic compositions are heavy, and the middle drags; in the set pieces the making bears the weight.
Movement V
The coda returns to the road. Dragline tells the story to the men at work, and it is already a legend: the smile remembered, the death made a victory. The camera pulls up from a crossroads as a torn photograph is pieced together over it, and the cross the shot makes is the film’s last word on its figure. The coda turns the film into the legend it has been showing being made, and leaves open whether the legend redeems the death or falsifies it, whether the film believes in the saint it makes or exposes the making. The ending reaches for transcendence and partly gains it; it is underlined rather than earned in silence.
The film has been read as a Christ allegory, an existential fable of the absurd hero, a document of the counterculture’s refusal and a study of the gang as an audience making a star, and those readings converge quickly on the Christ figure and the rebel. Its reach lies largely in the culture: the Captain’s line passed into common speech, and the smiling prisoner and the boss in mirrored glasses passed into the genre. Fifty-nine years on it survives whole as released, in continuous circulation in America and narrower presence elsewhere, a presence carried in part by the line and by Newman’s fame. Its surface dates a little, in the star vehicle of 1967, the zooms and the car wash, and the road gang ages as period.
Among the prison films and star vehicles of its kind on the desk, The Shawshank Redemption, which builds its prisoner’s redemption into the plot, stands at 7.8, and Dog Day Afternoon, which articulates the crowd that makes a hero of its trapped man as mechanism, stands at 7.7. Cool Hand Luke stands at 7.6, in Tier III. What holds it below Tier IV is the same in every place: a disclosure drawn as allegory, a myth announced by pose, a swerve on a proven path, a reach in the culture more than in the craft, and a middle of loosely joined feats. What it holds is a ladder of escapes built exactly, a man consumed by those who need him, and a refusal made into a legend before the viewer’s eyes.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The spine is required: each escape costs more than the last, so the three escapes and their punishments make a ladder rather than a repetition, and the box, the chains and the ditch rise in exact order. The mother’s visit is required by the box, and her death sends Luke over the wall; the poker bluff is required by his name and by the end, where nothing in the hand is again his whole stake. Dragline’s course, from enemy to apostle to betrayer, is a second spine and holds. The joints show elsewhere: the car wash scene lingers past its one point, the eggs repeat theirs, and much of the middle is a run of feats any one of which might go.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. A closed institution needs to break the one man who will not consent, and the men it holds need him not to break, so that the refuser is consumed twice: by the bosses who kill him and by the gang who make a saint of him. Luke says so himself, when after the second recapture he begs the men to stop needing him and they turn on him for failing them; the coda proves it, the death already a victory in Dragline’s telling. Under it lies the Captain’s paternalism, punishment spoken in the voice of care. What holds the figure: the disclosure is drawn as allegory rather than mechanism, and the prison’s economy, the state that fills it and Luke’s motive are left blank.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The elevation is of several kinds and comes at intervals. The tarring of the road, the gang driven by Luke into a frenzy of work until they finish early and sit idle in the sun, is a lift of pure exhilaration, cut to Lalo Schifrin’s music. Luke on the table after the eggs, arms spread and belly swollen, is grotesque and solemn at once. Luke alone on his bunk with the banjo, singing “Plastic Jesus” after the telegram, is the warmest summit, grief held under a joke; the church at night, a prayer that meets silence and then car lights in the window, is the coldest. Held where it is by long stretches of genre texture between the summits, and by a last summit underlined rather than earned in silence.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The myth is built and bears weight. Luke is the Christ of a gang of men: he takes on a suffering the others watch, lies cruciform on the table after the eggs, has a Peter in Dragline who fights him, follows him and hands him over, prays in an empty church before his taking, is killed, and lives on in the gospel of a follower who tells it to the faithful on the road. The crossroads at the end makes the figure explicit. Beside it runs the trickster and the stoic, the man whose one weapon is refusal. The particulars stay particular: a boiled egg, a banjo, a snapping turtle shot from the water. What holds the figure is signposting: the pattern is pressed on the viewer by pose and composition rather than discovered beneath the story.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is the American prison picture, with I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) behind it, and the rebel hero of the 1950s that Paul Newman had himself played. The turns are real. The hero has no cause: he is in for a drunk’s act of vandalism and will not say why he did it; the prison is not unjust in any way a reform could mend; the film refuses the escape picture’s payoff and kills its star; and it lays a religious figure across a star vehicle for Warner Bros. What holds the figure is the stake. This is a studio picture built on a star at the height of his draw, from a novel, classical in form throughout, and it places the antihero of its moment on a proven path.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. The ladder of escapes, each answered by a harsher act, is the form of a will tested to the end, and the repetition is part of the knowledge: the viewer comes to want Luke to run again, as the men do, and so shares the hunger that consumes him. The coda in Dragline’s mouth turns the film into the legend it has been showing being made. Conrad Hall’s camera makes the bosses an instrument of form: Boss Godfrey’s mirrored glasses, the man with no eyes, watch from behind the gang in shot after shot, the law as a gaze that does not speak. What holds the figure: the camp episodes are container rather than instrument, and the religious meaning is placed on the form by image.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence across fifty-nine years. The film has been read as a Christ allegory, as an existential fable of the absurd hero, as a document of the counterculture’s refusal set in a Southern road camp, and as a study of the cult of celebrity, the gang an audience making a star. The questions stay open: whether Luke’s last talk with God is faith or despair; whether Dragline’s legend redeems the death or falsifies it; whether the film believes in the saint it makes or exposes the making. Newman’s performance yields on return, the smile reading differently once the end is known. What holds the figure is the shape of the yield: the readings converge quickly on the Christ figure and the rebel, and on return the symbolism grows plainer rather than deeper.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1960s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is moderate: the film made the prison picture a passion play and gave the antihero of the late 1960s his martyr’s death inside a classical studio form, without reorganising how films are made or what they may hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is real and lies largely in the culture rather than the craft. The Captain’s line about a “failure to communicate” passed into common speech, and the smiling, unbreakable prisoner and the boss in mirrored glasses passed into the genre. Later prison films descend from it only in part; in a decade others moved, it was a strong film of the field rather than one that moved it.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-nine years. The form is whole: the film survives as released, and any restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous: in repertory and on television, on every home format, in teaching, and beyond the cinema in its line, known to many who have not seen the film. That presence is wide in America and narrower elsewhere, and it rests in good part on the line and on Newman’s fame, which are presence rather than proof. The surface is charged a little: the star vehicle of 1967, the zooms and the leering car wash scene date it, though the road gang and its rules age as period rather than as fashion. The axis stands highest of the twelve, on a whole form and long exhibition.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the set pieces. Hall photographs heat: dust, sweat, white sky, the glare in the mirrored glasses, light through the church window at night. Sam O’Steen cuts the tarring and the eggs to a comic rhythm that never loses the menace of the guns at the edge of frame. Schifrin’s score is spare and used sparingly. Newman carries the film on a smile that is defiance, charm and despair by turns; George Kennedy’s Dragline is the performance of the film, the man who needs a hero; Strother Martin makes the Captain’s softness frightening. The charges: the direction is sound rather than inspired between the set pieces, the zooms are of their year, the symbolic compositions heavy, and the middle drags.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the men cheering as Luke swallows the fiftieth egg, and Luke alone in the church at night, waiting for an answer. One law governs both: the man who will not yield is watched, by the men who need him and the bosses who must break him, and above them by a silence he addresses and that does not reply. The bluff, the fight, the box, the ditch, the escapes and the legend obey it, and the bosses’ silence answers God’s. The range is wide for a prison picture. What holds the figure is strain: the car wash belongs to a cruder film, the mother’s visit sits apart in tone, and the Christ imagery is at points laid over the law rather than issuing from it.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 126 minutes holds. The state is held as a penal institution with its full hierarchy, captain, bosses, trusties and walking bosses, and its law; labour as the gang’s work on the roads, with its rhythms and pleasures; the community of men, with its rivalries, its gambling and its need for a hero; the family in one visit and a telegram; the sacred in the church and the Christ figure; war in Luke’s medals, mentioned and left unexplored. What holds the figure lowest of the twelve: consciousness is rendered from outside by design, Luke’s inner life withheld; women are nearly absent but as a mother and a fantasy; history and the society that fills the prison, race in a Southern road camp among it, are left out of frame; nature is heat and swamp, a setting rather than an order.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 7.9. A film whole as released and in continuous circulation for fifty-nine years, with a line that passed into common speech; a Christ of a gang of men built through the action, from the table after the eggs to the church and the gospel told on the road; and set pieces in which heat, cutting and performance carry the weight.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: the camp’s hierarchy, its labour and its men are held, with the family, the sacred and war touched, but consciousness is withheld by design, women are nearly absent, and history, race and the society that fills the prison are left out of frame. Above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.2, a reach in the culture more than in the craft, and The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 7.3, a turn placed on a proven path and a symbolism that grows plainer on return.
The Necessity Cap is met at 7.5 against a threshold of 7.5, exactly. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.6, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 7.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Unconcealment at 7.6, The Swerve at 7.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.2 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Swerve, 7.3, The Bottomless Well, 7.3, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.2, each below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.6, from a sum of 91.1, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Cool Hand Luke as released by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts in 1967, in colour and Panavision widescreen, about 126 minutes, in English, from the parking meters to the crossroads: directed by Stuart Rosenberg from a screenplay by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson after Pearce’s novel of 1965, photographed by Conrad Hall, edited by Sam O’Steen, with music by Lalo Schifrin; with Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Strother Martin, Jo Van Fleet and Morgan Woodward. The film as released is the object; restoration bears on survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, which here is two short phrases, and speech is otherwise described; a song is cited by its title. Details that could not be verified, among them the month of release, the producer and the producing company, the places where the film was shot, the scene and shot counts, the share of the dialogue and the existence of any other cut, are not given.