Strother Martin

Role: 

Cool Hand Luke

His crime: nonconformity. His sentence: the chain gang. Paul Newman plays one of his best loved roles as Cool Hand Luke, the loner who won't - or can't - bend to the arbitrary rules of his captivity. A cast of fine actors, including George Kennedy in his Oscar winning role of Dragline and the indelible Jo Van Fleet as Luke's mother, give Newman solid support. And Strother Martin is the Captain who taunts Luke with the now legendary line, "What we've got here is...failure to communicate." No failure here.

The Wild Bunch

One of the best action movies ever made, in a cleaned-up print restoring crucial parts of the story. No cavalry ever rode in with more epochal impact than the Wild Bunch in the legendary opening scene. Their steel-eyed leader, Pike (William Holden), and his robbers in stolen army uniforms help an old lady across the street, and then spark a massacre led by Pike's old crony Thornton (Robert Ryan), sprung from jail to hunt down his old gang.

Up In Smoke

Cheech & Chong's first cannabis comedy is also their best, a souvenir from the more carefree days before "Just Say No," when people did not feel so defensive about inhaling.

Slap Shot

This irreverent and outrageously funny look at the world of professional ice hockey has Paul Newman as the coach of the Chiefs, a third-rate, minor league hockey team. To build up attendance at their games, management signs up three odd-looking players whose job it is to literally attack and demolish opposition - to the delight and cheers of a steadily increasing throng of fans. Slap Shot's hockey sequences, reminiscent of the football games in M*A*S*H and The Longest Yard, offer a freewheeling mixture of slapstick humor and grisly physical violence.

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

One of the most popular screen Westerns ever made, this Academy Award-winning classic blends adventure, romance and comedy to tell the true story of the West's most likeable outlaws. No one is quicker than Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) when it comes to get-rich-quick schemes, and his sidekick Sundance (Robert Redford) is a wizard with a gun. When these two bungling train robbers tire of running from the law, they set out for Bolivia with Sundance's girlfriend (Katharine Ross).

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