Word: prisons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Despite fatigue, spirits were high. Considering their daily fight to survive in the tiny prison compound in the pestiferous heart of the Mekong Delta, their condition was remarkable. "Coming back," said Pitzer, "is like being born again...
...techniques have been curbed. In the courts, the regime lately takes more care to keep an outward show of legality, but it easily ignores the law when convenient; the party, after all, is above the law. Some dissenters against the regime have been classed as "parasites" and sent to prison under broad vagrancy laws. Others have been diagnosed as mentally ill and ordered confined in psychiatric hospitals...
...chain-gang picture has been in stir for years. Now it has turned up again, paroled as Cool Hand Luke, a close study of conditions in a Southern prison. Like its most celebrated predecessor, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Luke is the story of a simple man who falls afoul of the law and mechanically becomes destroyed by a so-called house of correction...
Arrested for knocking the tops off parking meters, Luke (Paul Newman) draws a two-year sentence. For a drifter who finds even open society confining, prison ought to prove unbearable, but Luke plays it cool. Eventually, he wins over his most hostile fellow inmates by refusing to knuckle under to the sadistic guards. One day he receives a telegram that his mother has died. She is his last tenuous touch with the outside world, and under the strain, he finally cracks. Sitting on his bunk, Luke, an avowed village atheist, brokenly sings a parody of an oldtimey hymn...
...handed Christian symbolism-Luke is several times shown in crucified positions and has some unconvincing monologues with the God he doesn't believe in-is not only labored but out of style with the rest of the film. Rosenberg's treatment of evil, personified by the brutal prison guards, descends too often from portrayal to caricature. Still, there is enough left in the old theme to make Luke a prisoner of grace, and a picture of chilling dramatic power...