OSCARS '67: Cool Hand Luke
Probably the coolest movie you’ll ever see.
CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of violence, torture, prisons, labor camps, sadistic wardens, death of a loved one, prayer and Christian iconography.
1967 was a year of change, with the growth in revolutionary ideas, escalation of the war in Vietnam, and the “Summer of Love”. So it’s fitting that one of the real big award contenders that year was a prison chain-gang movie about refusing to conform with societal standards. One that just so happened to have the dashing, blue-eyed, cooler than cool Paul Newman at its helm. And while this movie isn’t perfect - it suffers a bit of Kubrick rule fatigue and sometimes belabors the point - there’s something both charming and haunting at the core of this film. We’re brought to a place where even the most iron-willed person will eventually get broken by authority, even if that person might go out with a giant smirk on his face. We continue our ‘67 Oscars series with Cool Hand Luke on this episode of Macintosh & Maud Haven’t Seen What?!
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Intro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive.
Excerpt taken of the introductory music for the 1968 Academy Awards, arranged and conducted by Elmer Bernstein, and performed by the Academy Awards Orchestra.
Excerpt taken from “Main Title” from the motion picture Cool Hand Luke, composed by Lalo Schifrin. Copyright 1967 Warner Bros.-Seven Arts.
Clips from Cool Hand Luke are copyright 1967 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.
Clip from the pilot episode of Cheers, “Ring Me Up Sometime,” is copyright 2011 CBS Corp.
Clip from the main title sequence of Doctor Dolittle was written and composed by Leslie Bricusse and conducted by Lionel Newman. © 1967 Apjac Productions, Inc. and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Renewed 1995 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
