There have been a number of exceptional prison films including Brubaker, Shawshank Redemption and The Defiant Ones. This film ranks up there with the best.
Paul Newman is one of Hollywood's most consistent performers providing us with winning films like The Hustler, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and this film. He plays a bored, disillusioned man who is caught cutting the tops off of parking meters after drinking too much. If he had done that in another area of the USA, things may have turned out differently. But this being the South (Florida), in the 50s, he is sentenced to two years on a chain gang. Bad scene.
The prison warden punishes even the smallest violation with harsh, brutal consequences. Luke lives through a series of events, each met with increasingly harsh repercussions, barely surviving some of them, all meant to break him emotionally and mentally. The film runs at just a smidge over 2 hours (126 minutes), but doesn't slow down at all. There doesn't seem to be a single flat spot in the film as Luke engages the other prisoners, the guards (led by a sunglasses-wearing walking boss the prisoners have nicknamed "the man with no eyes", and the warden. He listens, he decides, he retorts, he rebels, he suffers, he rebounds, he repeats, while all the time, refusing to fold as a man.
The film is famous for its boiled egg segment (no spoilers in case you haven't seen it), the oft-quoted phrase "What we've got here is failure to communicate" and a car wash scene that may have been written by a 7th grade boy, and does absolutely nothing to advance the film or build character. The film addresses human difficulty, brutal setbacks, the strength of the human spirit, the power of "no quit"and what can be accomplished by simply refusing to sit down and stop moving.
The film echoes that many of us as humans face tremendous hardship in our daily lives whether that be emotionally, physically, mentally, financially and more. Movies like Cool Hand Luke can be encouraging (not that it's not extremely discouraging at times) while entertaining. It's not a message movie. Its first purpose is to entertain and tell a story. But the subtext is much deeper than films that have been written as message films and do a much worse job of getting the message across.
The movie ask questions of us: "What do we do in the face of physical danger, emotional cruelty, mental abuse?" Many people would say quit, but that's not a story to enjoy (which leads into my biggest problem with movies like Million Dollar Baby). Cool Hand Luke shows what someone can accomplish when, regardless of brutal resistance, they will not stop. Cool Hand Luke celebrates that the act of not stopping as the win. Some viewers may be disappointed with the end of the film. I certainly wasn't.
IMDB has Cool Hand Luke as an 8.1/10. Yes, maybe even better. It's one of the 10 best prison/fugitive films ever made. (Note: Much of the film was shot in the California San Joaquin Delta, the area where I grew up. That was fun to discover).
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