COOL HAND LUKE, 1967, Warner Bros., 126 min. Dir. Stuart Rosenberg. "What we've got here is a failure to communicate." Cool-cat Luke (Paul Newman) is sentenced to a chain gang for a minor offense, and his free spirit foments a dangerous contest of wills with the warden (Strother Martin) and his sadistic underlings (Morgan Woodward, et. al.). Luke doesn't fit in that well, even with his jailhouse brethren, including Dragline (George Kennedy, Best Supporting Actor Oscar).
WUSA, 1970, Paramount, 115 min. LUKE director Stuart Rosenberg reunites with Paul Newman in this hard-to-see, underrated adaptation of Robert Stone's Hall of Mirrors. Newman is a hard-drinking disc jockey looking for a job in New Orleans. Con man Laurence Harvey, masquerading as a fundamentalist preacher, points Newman to WUSA, a right-wing radio station run by megalomaniac Pat Hingle. Meanwhile, naïve social worker Anthony Perkins is used by Hingle to help perpetrate a welfare-fraud smear.