A few nights ago, I saw the 1967 movie "Cool Hand Luke" starring Paul Newman. Several minutes into watching the movie, I was realized I had never seen it before. I saw clips of the movie--I could remember Newman eating the last of 50 hard-boiled eggs. He ate the eggs in an hour in prison. The character Luke Jackson claimed he could eat fifty eggs in one hour. All of the other inmates bet on whether he could or couldn't.
He could.
For those who know the movie, that may be the most famous scene. The most famous and still-quoted line form the movie is said twice by "The Captain" who runs the prison in rural Florida.
He says, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." The Captain first says this when he puts the beaten Luke in "the box" after he was caught trying to escape for the first time. The next time the Captain says the same phrase, Luke is in the window of a Church waiting to be re-captured after this third attempt to escape. After the Captain says, "What we have here is a failure to communicate" Luke is fatally shot in the neck by the prison sharpshooter.
The movie has many funny moments. Paul Newman is funny even in the sadistic world of a southern road-gang prison. The movie is brutal and violent when it is not funny. Newman's character Luke is a decorated World War II veteran with a silver star and a bronze star for gallantry under fire. But he has PTSD.
The movie opens with Luke drunk and drinking straight from the bottle. He is on a walkway between parking spaces in a southern town. Parking meters mounted on 3-inch pipes lines the edges of the walkway. Luke has a large pipe cutter. He staggers from meter to meter cutting the pipe and watching the meters drop to the ground. He doesn't rob the meters, just cuts them off. After several sliced meters, he is arrested.
In the military, in corporate offices and just kidding around at lunch, I have heard the phrase, "What we have here is a failure to communicate" and did not know its origin, until now.
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