Trivia for
Cool Hand Luke (1967) More at IMDbPro »

• Bette Davis was first offered the role of Luke's mother, but refused the bit part.
  
  
• Luke's prison number (37) is a reference to the Bible - Luke 1:37. ("For with God nothing shall be impossible.")
  
  
• The music cue where Luke gets the men to work faster on the road was used later for many years by many ABC television stations as their "Eyewitness News" theme.
  
  
• The movie's line "What we've got here is failure to communicate." was voted as the #11 movie quote by the American Film Institute
  
  
• The lines "What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men." can be heard in the intro of the song "Civil War" by Guns N' Roses. They would use audio of the first line again during the song "Madagascar" on the 2008 album "Chinese Democracy."
  
  
• Truckloads of Spanish moss was shipped from Louisiana to the set in California to hang in the trees around the prison.
  
  
• Anthony Zerbe's film debut.
  
  
• A Southern prison camp was built for this movie just north of Stockton, California. A dozen buildings were constructed, including a barracks, mess hall, warden's quarters, guard shack, and dog kennels.
  
  
• While passing by the prison camp set, a San Joaquin County building inspector thought it was a recently constructed migrant worker's complex, and posted "condemned" notices on the buildings for not being up to code.
  
  
• In the "road-tarring" sequence, the actors actually blacktopped a mile-long stretch of highway for the county.
  
  
• The company that produced the film, Jalem Productions, is owned by Jack Lemmon.
  
  
• Ralph Waite's film debut.
  
  
• Jack Lemmon was the owner of Jalem Productions, which co-produced many of his films as well as Cool Hand Luke (1967).
  
  

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