50 free Cool Hand Luke trivia questions with answers. Cool Hand Luke came out in November 1967 and has never really left: the egg bet, the mirrored sunglasses, the road-tar sequence and the most misquoted line in prison-movie history are still in circulation nearly sixty years later. This quiz covers the film from the parking meters in the opening scene to the crossroads in the last shot, along with the cast of future stars buried in the chain gang and the ex-convict who wrote the book. It starts easy — what Luke did to get arrested, how many eggs, who won the Oscar — and works up to the details only obsessives know: which Florida road prison the crew measured, why a county inspector condemned the set, how much George Kennedy spent campaigning for his award, and what the novel does with quotation marks. There are also questions on Donn Pearce's own remarkable criminal record, Lalo Schifrin's score and its second life on TV news, and the film's afterlife in Guns N' Roses, the West End and professional darts. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the film, the novel and its author, and each question carries its source. Play it before a rewatch, or use it as a round at movie night; the difficulty scores tell you which ones are the gimmes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What drunken act gets Luke arrested at the start of the film?
Beheading parking meters
The word 'Violation' flashes on the meters as he works, the first of the film's many pointed traffic signs.
Q 02Who plays Lucas 'Luke' Jackson?
Paul Newman
He asked for the part after hearing about the project, and the film cemented his standing as one of the era's top box-office stars.
Q 03Luke is a decorated veteran of which war?
World War II
The story is set in the early 1950s, so his medals are only a few years old when he lands on the chain gang.
Q 04Luke earns his nickname by winning a poker game with what kind of cards?
A hand worth nothing
His reply that 'sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand' is what prompts Dragline to christen him.
Q 05How many hard-boiled eggs does Luke bet he can eat in an hour?
50
After the bet he lies on the table with arms outstretched and feet crossed, a deliberate crucifixion pose.
Q 06Who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Dragline?
George Kennedy
He said his salary was multiplied by ten the minute he won, and that he no longer had to play only villains.
Q 07What is Dragline's real name?
Clarence Slidell
Almost every convict in the camp is known by a nickname; the cast list is a roll call of Kokos, Rabbitts and Dynamites.
Q 08Why do the inmates call Walking Boss Godfrey 'the man with no eyes'?
He always wears mirrored sunglasses
The glasses only come off, symbolically shattered, in the film's final confrontation.
Q 09Which actor plays the silent, rifle-carrying Walking Boss?
Morgan Woodward
He described the character as a 'walking Mephistopheles' and later wore the same shades on The Dukes of Hazzard.
Q 10Who plays the Captain, the camp's warden?
Strother Martin
He was best known for westerns before this role made him the face of small-town institutional cruelty.
Q 11Where did 'What we've got here is failure to communicate' rank on the AFI's 100 greatest movie quotes?
Number 11
The line was never in the novel; the author said his real guards were '100% redneck' and would never have used such vocabulary.
Q 12Which screenwriter wrote the 'failure to communicate' line, fearing it was too fancy for the warden?
Frank Pierson
He invented a backstory in the stage directions about prison officers taking penology courses at the state university to justify the vocabulary.
Q 13Novelist Donn Pearce served his own two years on a Florida chain gang after being arrested for what?
Burglary
Q 21Which actress plays Luke's dying mother, Arletta, in a role Bette Davis turned down?
Jo Van Fleet
Critics singled out her single scene, the Los Angeles Times calling it 'a stunning piece of writing and acting'.
Q 22Who plays the blonde who torments the chain gang by washing her car?
Joy Harmon
She auditioned in a bikini without saying a word, and her half-day scene took three days to shoot.
Q 23For wide shots of the chain gang watching the car wash, who stood in for the actress?
A teenage cheerleader in an overcoat
He was a safecracker at the time; earlier he had been jailed in France for passing counterfeit dollars and escaped from a work detail.
Q 14Donn Pearce made a cameo in the film as a convict with which nickname?
Sailor
The nickname suits him: he had joined the Merchant Marine as a teenager and sailed to Venice, Spain, Denmark and Bombay.
Q 15The prison-camp set was built in which California city?
Stockton
The producers even brought in Spanish moss to drape the trees so the San Joaquin Delta would pass for the Deep South.
Q 16The filmmakers measured which real Florida facility, where Pearce had served, for the set?
Tavares Road Prison
The bloodhound chase and other exteriors were shot separately at a different Florida road prison near Jacksonville.
Q 17The opening parking-meter scene was filmed in which California town?
Lodi
The same small town gave Creedence Clearwater Revival a song title two years later.
Q 18A county building inspector ordered the prison set condemned after mistaking it for what?
Migrant worker housing
The barracks, mess hall, guard shack and dog kennels were apparently convincing enough to look like a code violation.
Q 19Who composed the film's Oscar-nominated score?
Lalo Schifrin
The same composer wrote the Mission: Impossible theme; here he mixed banjos and harmonicas with jazz-inflected brass.
Q 20An edited cue from the road-paving 'Tar Sequence' became widely familiar as what?
The theme for local TV news programs
Its staccato melody sounds a little like a telegraph, which is part of why ABC's stations adopted it for their newscasts.
The director wanted the cast to feel real deprivation, so the actress was kept out of sight in her hotel for two days.
Q 24What is 'a night in the box'?
Confinement in a small wooden booth in the yard
The Captain locks Luke in it pre-emptively when his mother dies, expecting him to try to escape for the funeral.
Q 25Which future Easy Rider star plays the convict Babalugats?
Dennis Hopper
The chain gang is stuffed with future names: Harry Dean Stanton, Wayne Rogers and an uncredited Joe Don Baker among them.
Q 26Which actor, later the father on The Waltons, plays 'Alibi' Gibson?
Ralph Waite
The Waltons debuted five years later, in 1972, and ran for nine seasons.
Q 27Who plays 'Dog Boy', the inmate who handles the bloodhounds?
Anthony Zerbe
The dogs in the chase scenes belonged to the Florida Department of Corrections and pursued a stuntman, not the star.
Q 28Wayne Rogers, later Trapper John on M*A*S*H, plays a convict known only as what?
Gambler
M*A*S*H did not start until 1972; here he is one face among two dozen in the barracks.
Q 29Jalem Productions, the company that developed the film, belonged to which actor?
Jack Lemmon
He publicly promised he would not appear in it, making it the first film his company produced without his star power.
Q 30The film premiered on November 1, 1967, at Loew's State Theatre. Where?
New York City
The premiere's proceeds went to charity, and the film went on to gross more than $16 million domestically.