 Upon its release , Cool Hand Luke received favorable reviews and became a box @-@ office success . The film cemented Newman 's status as one of the era 's top box @-@ office actors , while the film was described as the " touchstone of an era . " Newman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor , George Kennedy won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor , Pearce and Pierson were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay , and the score by Lalo Schifrin was also nominated for the Best Original Score . In 2005 , the United States Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry , considering it to be " culturally , historically , or aesthetically significant . " It has a rare 100 % rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes . The quotation used by the prison warden in the film , which begins with " What we 've got here is failure to communicate , " was listed at No. 11 on the American Film Institute 's list of the 100 most memorable movie lines . 
