Cool Hand Luke

All over the South you can see them--convict and workers in gray fatigues, trousers with faded white stripes down the leg and always a rifle-toting guard lounging nearby. They chop grass, pick up garbage, and tar highways under the sun and the swirling dustclouds. Look inside the chain gang and you will find a caricature of middle class American society: duties and pleasures are meticulously ordered and scheduled, "Learn the rules" is the old con's advice. And it is good advice, for the road camp is a world of regulations, conformity, and menacing authority.

Director Stuart Rosenberg has chosen such a Florida chain gang as a microcosm of society for his first feature-length film, Cool Hand Luke. Into it, he plunks a hero, Lucas Jackson, doing two years' hard labor for "maliciously destroying municipal property while under the influence ... Knocking the heads off parking meters."

Luke, played tightly but exuberantly by Paul New man, is a common man who is heading for trouble, everyone warns him, because he won't stay down. He portrays Christ as Rebel, the peasant radical elevated to deity, similar to Christ in Pasolini's Marxist-oriented The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.

Rosenberg, who directed much of the TV series "The Defenders," shows us how his untamed man operates in some unlikely ideological battlegrounds: a Saturday afternoon boxing match, a poker game, and an egg-eating contest.

Religious symbolism is an undercurrent throughout the film. Crosses abound: the final overhead shot of a cross-roads, a photograph ripped in the shape of a cross, Luke sprawling crucified in a pit-grave he has dug.

But Luke is no run-of-the-mill Christ figure. He is above all a rebel and his deification is reserved for the finale. He is far more Marlon Brando than Billy Budd. He tries to escape from camp twice and is brutally punished. Beaten into submission, he tells the guards, "I got my mind right. Don't hit me anymore." But he gets away again and is eventually trapped in a church, where with cops and rifles all around, he calmly sticks his head out a window and gets it blown off.

Rosenberg's spectre of authority is highly effective. Strother Martin is perfect as the camp warden. He speaks in a slow, mad, Truman Capote-like whine. In one scene, after savagely caning Luke, he looks at him writhing on the ground and says, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." This is the point--there is no communication between real men like Luke and the authority of a dull, oppressive society.

Rosenberg's camera records boredom (trucks rolling out in the dark and back home in the dusk), beauty (swatches of blue background sky with dusty greens and yellows splashed onto the screen in pleasing rhythms), and oppression (a slew of low-lying shots of guards' boots thumping on the ground.)

But he seems to have trouble with timing and spatial relationships. The editing is uneven, especially in the boxing and the road-tarring scenes. Rosenberg's camera records too much excitement from too many angles. What could have been classic sequences are reduced to patchworks of confusion. The screenplay, by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson, based on Pearce's novel, is highly successful. There is no failure to communicate here.