Cool Hand Luke 4K 1967

Do you want a universal recipe for a great psychological film? We take a combative protagonist - a charismatic, extraordinary guy with baby eyes and an unforgettable ear-to-ear smile, put him in a pot of a treatment/penitentiary/any closed-type institution, add a cunning/alcoholic/inhuman or all-in-one boss to taste and simmer on low heat for about two hours. In the process of boiling, the Man (with a capital letter) confronts the System with its numerous keepers/sanitarians who long ago lost the right to be called human - the end result is the same as when a spark goes into a powder cellar. A sea of pleasure. An unbelievable surge of emotion. And most importantly, a struggle. From hidden into a ruthless and uncompromising struggle. There can be no more halftones and agreements. Only "either-or". A man wins by breaking the system or by leaving the stuffy prison walls ("Escape from Shawshank", Oliver Hirschbigel's "The Experiment"), thus becoming a living legend, passed from mouth to mouth by his comrades-in-arms (actually, apostles) to the next generations. The system wins only on one condition: the moral destruction of the individual, because even his physical destruction is a losing one (Milos Forman's "Flight of the Cuckoo's Nest," "Cold-Blooded Luke"). For after him a chain reaction will inevitably arise the next one who wants to compete with the System.

The recipe is not new - use it. What's the value of Cold-Blooded Luke? That it can, without the slightest remorse, be called the grandfather of many of the later cinematic masterpieces named above. Of course, a more seasoned film critic might be able to find the "movie monkey" from which Stuart Rosenberg's film is descended, but I have no knowledge of such distant roots. So I will consider "Luke" a pioneer of the genre.

About the realization of a great idea... it is not without its weaknesses, but taking into account the year of release and revolutionary decisions (what about the scene with washing "Lucille" car for '67!) you can forgive the film even more than that.