Highly rated film that I don't rate that highly, if truth be told. There's plenty to savour, particularly in the acting stakes but I was ultimately confused and disappointed by the resolution to the various themes at play here.
The enigmatic opening, with Newman's Luke character casually vandalising the state's parking meters amusingly recalled to me the famous tag-line from Bob Dylan's near contemporaneous song "Subterraneaen Homesick Blues" - "Don't follow leaders and watch the parking meters", (both parts of the line are relevant - at one point he screams "Stop feeding off me" to his "follower" inmates) as Luke gets incarcerated in a brutally-run Southern prison work-house and becomes the unlikely and from his point of view, at times unwelcome talismanic figure representing to his fellow inmates a focal point of resistance to authority and in a wider sense, general conformity.
And yet this self-effacing persona which Luke adopts more than once however doesn't square, with me, to the self-publicising acts he does elsewhere, most famously the fight scene with the prison's "Big Daddy" inmate, Dragline, played by Arthur Kennedy and of course the egg-scoffing scene, where he deliberately draws attention to himself. I also didn't get Kennedy's character's change (adapting Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men") from George to Lennie, when after punching Luke to a pulp and establishing one would think once and for all superiority over him, we see him by the end almost acting as his lackey. Add to that an admittedly revisionist minor revulsion at the blatantly sexist soft-porn episode of the tongues-out chain gang ogling a scantily-clad nymphet foaming up a car and you can tell I had some issues with the movie, although a minor counter-case against the latter could be made for the insertion of the very mild homo-erotic and played for laughs sub "Jailhouse Rock" scene of the prisoners dancing with each other, dressed only in their shorts, on the 4th of July.
The ambiguities in the narrative however threw me off-kilter and while I can see that I was expected to cut Newman's character a lot of slack as a societal misfit whose "different-ness" is accentuated further after his beloved mother dies, ultimately, again to paraphrase Dylan, nothing has been proved. As to style, director Rosenberg certainly captures the heat and sweat of the workhouse but even then a lot of his imagery seems second-hand, lifting from the likes of Leone and Sturges. Lalo Schifrin delivers a satisfactory if occasionally blaring soundtrack.
The acting is great though, yet I'm sure I can see Steve McQueen playing the Newman role better. Arthur Kennedy is robust enough until he's reduced to a simpering wimp by the conclusion. Strother Martin, with that enervating southern drawl gets most of the best lines (especially the well-known "What we have here is a failure to communicate") and his underlings similarly exude cruelty and inhumanity, especially when breaking Luke over the pointless digging of a ditch. Amongst the inmates, by the way, it's interesting to note emerging actors of the television screen like Wayne Rogers ("M.A.S.H."), Ralph Waite ("The Waltons", "Mississipi") and Anthony Zerbe (everything else...) plus the young (Harry) Dean Stanton and Dennis Hopper.
Grandstanding scenes notwithstanding, by the conclusion, the film hadn't held me as it should have done and further weakened its case as an expose of the working methods of jail-masters of the recent past with a sentimental collage of Newman's smiling image set before us with all the integrity of an episode of the afore-mentioned "The Waltons".
The enigmatic opening, with Newman's Luke character casually vandalising the state's parking meters amusingly recalled to me the famous tag-line from Bob Dylan's near contemporaneous song "Subterraneaen Homesick Blues" - "Don't follow leaders and watch the parking meters", (both parts of the line are relevant - at one point he screams "Stop feeding off me" to his "follower" inmates) as Luke gets incarcerated in a brutally-run Southern prison work-house and becomes the unlikely and from his point of view, at times unwelcome talismanic figure representing to his fellow inmates a focal point of resistance to authority and in a wider sense, general conformity.
And yet this self-effacing persona which Luke adopts more than once however doesn't square, with me, to the self-publicising acts he does elsewhere, most famously the fight scene with the prison's "Big Daddy" inmate, Dragline, played by Arthur Kennedy and of course the egg-scoffing scene, where he deliberately draws attention to himself. I also didn't get Kennedy's character's change (adapting Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men") from George to Lennie, when after punching Luke to a pulp and establishing one would think once and for all superiority over him, we see him by the end almost acting as his lackey. Add to that an admittedly revisionist minor revulsion at the blatantly sexist soft-porn episode of the tongues-out chain gang ogling a scantily-clad nymphet foaming up a car and you can tell I had some issues with the movie, although a minor counter-case against the latter could be made for the insertion of the very mild homo-erotic and played for laughs sub "Jailhouse Rock" scene of the prisoners dancing with each other, dressed only in their shorts, on the 4th of July.
The ambiguities in the narrative however threw me off-kilter and while I can see that I was expected to cut Newman's character a lot of slack as a societal misfit whose "different-ness" is accentuated further after his beloved mother dies, ultimately, again to paraphrase Dylan, nothing has been proved. As to style, director Rosenberg certainly captures the heat and sweat of the workhouse but even then a lot of his imagery seems second-hand, lifting from the likes of Leone and Sturges. Lalo Schifrin delivers a satisfactory if occasionally blaring soundtrack.
The acting is great though, yet I'm sure I can see Steve McQueen playing the Newman role better. Arthur Kennedy is robust enough until he's reduced to a simpering wimp by the conclusion. Strother Martin, with that enervating southern drawl gets most of the best lines (especially the well-known "What we have here is a failure to communicate") and his underlings similarly exude cruelty and inhumanity, especially when breaking Luke over the pointless digging of a ditch. Amongst the inmates, by the way, it's interesting to note emerging actors of the television screen like Wayne Rogers ("M.A.S.H."), Ralph Waite ("The Waltons", "Mississipi") and Anthony Zerbe (everything else...) plus the young (Harry) Dean Stanton and Dennis Hopper.
Grandstanding scenes notwithstanding, by the conclusion, the film hadn't held me as it should have done and further weakened its case as an expose of the working methods of jail-masters of the recent past with a sentimental collage of Newman's smiling image set before us with all the integrity of an episode of the afore-mentioned "The Waltons".