Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 American drama film starring Paul Newman and directed by Stuart Rosenberg. The screenplay was adapted by Donn Pearce and Frank Pierson from the novel by Pearce. The film features George Kennedy, Strother Martin, J.D. Cannon and Morgan Woodward.
Newman stars in the title role as Luke, a prisoner in a Georgia Road prison camp who refuses to submit to the system. His inability to conform drives the plot of the movie, in the same vein as characters such as Winston Smith from Nineteen Eighty-Four, Randle McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Number Six from the British television series The Prisoner (aired during the same year) and Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles.
In 2005, the United States Library of Congress deemed Cool Hand Luke to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. (wiki)
