Cool Hand Luke Trivia
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49 free Cool Hand Luke trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What drunken act gets Luke arrested at the start of the film?
Beheading parking meters
Beheading parking meters with a pipe cutter while drunk is the 'small-town' crime that sends Luke to the camp; the meters' 'Violation' flags are the film's opening image.
Q 02Who plays Lucas 'Luke' Jackson?
Paul Newman
Paul Newman earned his fourth Best Actor nomination as Luke, losing to Rod Steiger for In the Heat of the Night at the 1968 ceremony.
Q 03What rank does Luke's army record show he held when discharged?
Buck private
Buck private is what Luke's record shows on his arrival: decorated with a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and Purple Hearts, he made sergeant but was busted back down.
Q 04Luke earns his nickname by winning a poker game with what kind of cards?
A hand worth nothing
A hand worth nothing wins the pot: Luke bluffs Dragline's crew, then shrugs that 'sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand', and Dragline christens him.
Q 05How many hard-boiled eggs does Luke bet he can eat in an hour?
50
50 eggs in an hour is the bet, and Luke forces down the last of them before collapsing on the table in a crucifixion pose, arms spread and ankles crossed.
Q 06Who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Dragline?
George Kennedy
George Kennedy won the 1968 Supporting Actor Oscar for Dragline, beating John Cassavetes, Gene Hackman, Cecil Kellaway and Michael J. Pollard.
Q 07What is Dragline's real name?
Clarence Slidell
Clarence Slidell is Dragline's given name, though like nearly every convict in the camp he goes only by his nickname, alongside Koko, Rabbitt and Dynamite.
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
Morgan Woodward plays Boss Godfrey, the Walking Boss, a role without a single spoken line; he later played Punk Anderson on Dallas.
Q 10Who plays the Captain, the camp's warden?
Strother Martin
Strother Martin plays the Captain, the camp's warden who delivers the 'failure to communicate' speech after Luke's first recapture.
Q 11Where did 'What we've got here is failure to communicate' rank on the AFI's 100 greatest movie quotes?
Number 11
Number 11 is where the AFI's 100 Movie Quotes list placed the Captain's line, between Taxi Driver's 'You talking to me?' at 10 and Apocalypse Now's napalm line at 12.
Q 12Which screenwriter wrote the 'failure to communicate' line, fearing it was too fancy for the warden?
Frank Pierson
Frank Pierson, who shared the screenplay credit with Pearce, wrote the line and, worried it was too literate for the Captain, gave him a backstory of college coursework to justify it.
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
Jo Van Fleet, an Oscar winner for East of Eden, plays Arletta in one scene, visiting Luke from the back of a pickup truck before her death offscreen.
Q 22Who plays the blonde who torments the chain gang by washing her car?
Joy Harmon
Joy Harmon plays the car-washing girl in a wordless scene that became one of the film's most famous images, second only to the egg bet.
Q 23What name does Dragline give the girl washing her car beside the road?
Lucille
Lucille is the name Dragline gives the car-washing girl, insisting she knows exactly what she is doing to the men, though she never says a word on screen.
Burglary, specifically safecracking, put Donn Pearce on a Florida chain gang for two years in his early twenties, the experience behind his novel.
Q 14Donn Pearce made a cameo in the film as a convict with which nickname?
Sailor
Sailor is the convict Donn Pearce plays in his cameo, a nod to the years he spent in the Merchant Marine before his own chain-gang term.
Q 15The prison-camp set was built in which California city?
Stockton
Stockton, in the San Joaquin Delta, is where the camp set went up in 1966, standing in for central Florida for the bulk of the shoot.
Q 16The filmmakers measured which real Florida facility, where Pearce had served, for the set?
Tavares Road Prison
Tavares Road Prison, the Lake County camp where Pearce had served, was measured by the production so its California replica would match the real thing.
Q 17The opening parking-meter scene was filmed in which California town?
Lodi
Lodi, a small San Joaquin County town, hosted the parking-meter shoot; Creedence Clearwater Revival made the town a song title in 1969.
Q 18A county building inspector ordered the prison set condemned after mistaking it for what?
Migrant worker housing
Migrant worker housing is what the inspector took the set for, its barracks, mess hall and guard shack realistic enough to read as substandard farm-labour quarters.
Q 19Who composed the film's Oscar-nominated score?
Lalo Schifrin
Lalo Schifrin, composer of the Mission: Impossible theme, wrote the score, which lost the Oscar to Elmer Bernstein's Thoroughly Modern Millie.
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.
Q 24What is 'a night in the box'?
Confinement in a small wooden booth in the yard
Confinement in a small wooden booth in the yard is the camp's punishment; the Captain puts Luke in it when Arletta dies, expecting him to bolt for the funeral.
Q 25Which future Easy Rider star plays the convict Babalugats?
Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper plays Babalugats two years before Easy Rider, alongside other future names in the barracks such as Harry Dean Stanton and an uncredited Joe Don Baker.
Q 26Which actor, later the father on The Waltons, plays 'Alibi' Gibson?
Ralph Waite
Ralph Waite, John Walton Sr. on The Waltons from 1972, plays 'Alibi' Gibson, one of the chain gang's convicts.
Q 27Who plays 'Dog Boy', the inmate who handles the bloodhounds?
Anthony Zerbe
Anthony Zerbe plays Dog Boy, the trusty who runs the camp's bloodhounds; Zerbe later won a 1976 Emmy for the detective series Harry O.
Q 28Wayne Rogers, later Trapper John on M*A*S*H, plays a convict known only as what?
Gambler
Gambler is Wayne Rogers' convict, a small part five years before M*A*S*H made him Trapper John in 1972.
Q 29Jalem Productions, the company that developed the film, belonged to which actor?
Jack Lemmon
Jack Lemmon's Jalem Productions bought the rights to Pearce's novel and developed the film, with Lemmon staying off screen; Gordon Carroll took the producer credit.
Q 30In which city did the film premiere at Loew's State Theatre on November 1, 1967?
New York City
New York City hosted the premiere at Loew's State Theatre in Times Square on November 1, 1967; the film opened nationally later that month.