Morgan Woodward, Cool Hand Luke and the Joys of Trivia

Morgan Woodward died last week at the age of 93. He is a prime example of an actor whose named I forced myself to memorize when I was young. My memory was good and I filled it up as much as I could, with everything from facts about animals to trivia about comic books. I also memorized the names of actors I had seen on TV shows and movies, most of the movies when they were on TV years after their theatrical releases. This often meant waiting to the end of shows to write down notes about the cast lists. Back then, there was no Internet, so the research was harder to do. I took pride from a young age in identifying actors when someone would say "Who's that guy who was in...?" Morgan Woodward wasn't just Oh That Guy to me. His TV career started in 1956, and he worked steadily until the late 1990s. retiring in his early seventies. In the 1980s, he finally got lucky enough to be a regular on the long-running prime-time soap opera Dallas. A gig like that was the only way for a man who was never a star to get a steady paycheck. But for me, my favorite roles of his were from the late 1960s, two guest roles on the original Star Trek, once as an inmate in an asylum and once as a Starfleet captain, playing Boss Godfrey, a.k.a The Walking Boss, in the 1967 Paul Newman vehicle Cool Hand Luke.

This is a perfect camera shot. Morgan Woodward's face is framed under the black circle of his hat, his eyes hidden behind reflecting sunglasses. The Walking Boss doesn't say much, and he doesn't have to. The prisoners are terrified of him, as well they should be. Lots of character actors get to chew the scenery - Woodward did in both his guest roles on Star Trek - but here he is not just cool, he is cold. The movie is about Luke defying authority, and The Walking Boss makes the stakes of that defiance clear. One false step and The Walking Boss would kill him.

Cool Hand Luke is as entertaining as a trip through hell can be, but it's also a trivia goldmine. The stars of the film are definitely Paul Newman and George Kennedy, but the cast is full from top to bottom with actors whose careers either already had great performances or young actors who would become much more famous within a few years' time.

One of the actors who already had famous credits was Jo Van Fleet as Luke's mom. In real life, she was only ten years older than Newman, but due to make-up and acting ability and Newman being so damned pretty, you never think she's too young to be his mother. A decade earlier, Van Fleet had a small, pivotal role in East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.

Another actor who had great roles before and after Cool Hand Luke is Strother Martin. Many actors' careers back in the day were either defined as TV actors or film actors, but Martin switched back and forth regularly. He was famous for overacting. For a movie actor, his characters have a lot of tics and eccentricities, but it's always fun to see him on screen. He was in several of Paul Newman's films after Cool Hand Luke, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Pocket Money and Slap Shot. 

The cast is full to the brim with actors who would be much more famous within ten years. Among the faces you might be able to pick out of this crowd from left to right are Ralph Waite, George Kennedy, Joe Don Baker, Wayne Rogers, Dennis Hopper and Harry Dean Stanton. Of those six, Joe Don Baker was just an extra, his character had no name and he had no lines. 

As I said earlier, a trivia goldmine.

The movie is over fifty years old, so it is no surprise most of the cast is gone. Now that Woodward has died, the only surviving actors are Lou Antonio, Harry Dean Stanton, Anthony Zerbe, Joe Don Baker, Kim Kahana and Joy Harmon, who played the girl washing the car that George Kennedy's character Dragline named Lucille, the proximate cause of the famous fight between Dragline and Luke. As far as I can tell, she was the youngest person in the cast. Ms. Harmon turns 80 next year. Besides Cool Hand Luke, where she has no lines and only a single scene, her best known work is as Merrie in the 1965 sci-fi movie Village of the Giants, a much bigger role both literally and figuratively in a much less well-known film.

I apologize to Morgan Woodward for making an essay that should be an appreciation of his career into a memory exercise. My only excuse is the name of this blog is To the Best of My Recollection, and a major reason my recollection became good was from following the careers of the character actors like Morgan Woodward that I saw on TV when I was young.