Cool Hand Luke - Famous Line

Famous Line

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. And I don't like it any more than you men.

The line is frequently taken as "What we've got here is a failure to communicate." Both are correct. This line is heard twice in the film, first in its entirety, with no "a", by the Captain (Strother Martin), and later on the first line with an "a", said by Luke. In the "making of" feature on the Blu-ray disc, Frank Pierson, the screenplay's co-writer, says that the line "just appeared" on the page as he was typing (that is, it was the result of his subconscious thought). After some debate over whether it was "too intellectual" a remark for the Captain, it was retained.

Strother Martin himself recalled in the book, Films of the Sixties, that he felt the line was one which his character, would very likely have heard or read, from some "pointy-headed intellectuals" that had begun to infiltrate his character's world in the 1960s, under the general rubric of a new, enlightened, approach to incarceration.

The quote was listed at #11 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 most memorable movie lines. An audio sample of the line is included in the Guns n' Roses songs "Civil War" and "Madagascar".