No matter how hot it got, the cast and crew played poker and drank until late. Lou Antonio, who played Koko, recalls when Waite decided to cool off in earnest. “‘Lou!’ Ralph yelled as he was taking off his shirt. By the time he was two feet away from me, Ralph was stark naked with this big grin,” Antonio says, laughing.

Inmates played by Ralph Waite, Lou Antonio, Dennis Hopper, Wayne Rogers and J.D. Cannon are in the crowd as Luke (Paul Newman) takes a pounding from Dragline (George Kennedy in his Academy Award-winning role) in Cool Hand Luke, 1967.

Ralph Waite's film debut. Bette Davis was first offered the role of Luke's mother, but refused the bit part. Donn Pearce who wrote the novel on which the movie is based, spent 2 years on a chain gang for safe-breaking.

Cool Hand Luke is as funny as a chain gang movie can be, and still be serious. Its unhappy hero is a lost soul who nevertheless inspires his fellow inmates. Even as it reruns the motif of the Free Man vs. the impersonal "System", Luke takes pains not to implicate the audience in its hero's problems.

He is sentenced to two years on a chain gang in a prison camp run by the Captain, a stern warden, and Walking Boss Godfrey, a quiet rifleman nicknamed "the man with no eyes" because he always wears mirrored sunglasses. There, even minor violations are punished by "a night in the box", a small wooden booth in the prison yard with limited air and ...