Cool Hand Luke 2
George Kennedy plays Dragline, the prisoner you remember most from Cool Hand Luke, the one who really gets to shaking as he watches sexy Joy Harmon wash that old car, dons his sunglasses (puttin’ ‘em on here, boss!) and removes his sunglasses (damn things is blocking the scenery!) trying to figure the best way to ogle her squatting stretching sponging (Lord, whatever I done don’t strike me blind for another couple of minutes!). The role won him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor—grunting and panting for Lucille, fiddling with his shovel, shaking out the demons.
In a Turner Classic Movies interview, George says Joy was initially hired for only a half day of shooting—just six hours to get coverage of her lathering up, slipping around and rubbing at the car’s contours—but they filmed her for three days. Because of the risqué nature of the scene only essential crew were allowed on set during Joy’s shoot; none of the actors (including George Kennedy and Paul Newman) ever actually saw sexy Joy amidst the suds. But George estimates the crew shot 86,000 feet of film—nearly 16 hours of sponging. George’s eyes, the twinkle in them as he says this, suggests there was absolutely no reason to use so much film on that scene. Less than two minutes of those 16 hours actually appears in the film, but two minutes was enough to set in motion the most ubiquitous collective sexual fantasy in American popular culture: the sexy carwash.
On the fourth day they shot the reverse of Joy—the chain gang digging the ditch and ogling. Joy had already far exceeded the half-day of her contract so a stand-in was used to hang around the car as the chain gang worked through their sexual frustration, shaking at the stand-in who George says was not washing the car at all but just stood near it because she was a 15 year-old girl in an overcoat, some production assistant used to give the actors an eyelevel but covered in a big overcoat despite the hot day because of decency—it would be perverse to have the men actually ogle a 15-year-old girl. But the chain gang: their shakes. This is the how movies work George says. The trickery. And you say that’s a shame because it’s less than 2 minutes of 16 hours of fleshy sudsy fullheavy Joy Harmon but really it’s more fucked up than that: the overcoat on a hot day! For three days the crew had been alone with Joy’s sexy carwash and they realized the power, the danger, felt guilt already about the thing they’d unleashed on the world and the overcoat was a shield for the 15 year-old girl, a prayer because even pretend things are never entirely pretend.