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If you want a Judge Roy Bean film you’d be better off with The Westerner
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“Maybe this wasn’t the way it was…it’s the way it should have been,” says an opening title of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Uh-oh..
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Despite starring Paul Newman and being directed by John Huston, this picture was only average. After playing Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy (he would later also be Buffalo Bill) Newman went for another mythic Western role, this time that of the criminal ‘judge’ who described himself as the only law west of the Pecos, Phantly Roy Bean Jr (c 1825 – 1903).
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Actually, Bean looked more like John Huston that he did Paul Newman. Never mind. Huston in fact appears in a bit part, as a wild mountain man, overacts in the dark for three minutes and then disappears. He was always good for a laugh.
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Bean and his equally disreputable brother Sam fled from Chihuahua after killing a Mexican. He escaped from a prison in California and set up a saloon. He was nearly hanged by some Mexican friends of a man he had killed and was left with a crooked neck and rope burn (in the movie he gets this in Vinegaroon and it wears off after the first reel – well, you couldn’t expect Newman to act skew-necked all the way through). He smuggled cotton to British ships for the South in the war and ended up in a tent city he named Vinegaroon (welcoming name) on the Pecos river. He was in fact a properly-authorized justice of the peace, not self-appointed as many think.
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Bean and his equally disreputable brother Sam fled from Chihuahua after killing a Mexican. He escaped from a prison in California and set up a saloon. He was nearly hanged by some Mexican friends of a man he had killed and was left with a crooked neck and rope burn (in the movie he gets this in Vinegaroon and it wears off after the first reel – well, you couldn’t expect Newman to act skew-necked all the way through). He smuggled cotton to British ships for the South in the war and ended up in a tent city he named Vinegaroon (welcoming name) on the Pecos river. He was in fact a properly-authorized justice of the peace, not self-appointed as many think.
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He moved his saloon/courthouse a couple of times, finally squatting in a new place he named Langtry, after Lily, who didn’t resemble Ava Gardner much, but again, never mind. They were both beautiful anyway..
Still, enough of the real-life Bean and his cinematic portrayals. We don’t watch Westerns for historical accuracy.
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Dramatically, it’s quite hard to make a man who casually hangs people when drunk all that sympathetic. This version is played for laughs although some of these laughs are in bad taste and some fall flat. The ‘humor’ when Anthony Perkins narrates, for example, and says he then died of dysentery, is singularly unfunny.
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There’s an appalling song crooned by Andy Williams which was clearly modeled on the ‘Raindrops’ sequence which almost single-handedly sank Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It’s awful.
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Jacqueline Bisset is Bean’s daughter Rose but her accent slips and is often more Weybridge, Surrey than Tex/Mex border. Stacey Keach as albino Bad Bob is totally over the top but fun. He gets a hole in him copied by The Quick and the Dead team.
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Some of the Richard Moore photography is quite nice, although a lot is too dark to make out what’s going on. Some of the Maurice Jarre music is irritatingly ‘comic’. At 121 minutes, the movie is too long.
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I felt sorry for the poor tame bear.
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The film’s alright, you know. It has its moments. If you like burlesque. It has a kind of Götterdämmerung ending in fire and flames. See it, yes. But The Westerner in 1940 was ten times better and Brennan’s Bean masterly. Newman’s OK, I guess, but…
The film’s alright, you know. It has its moments. If you like burlesque. It has a kind of Götterdämmerung ending in fire and flames. See it, yes. But The Westerner in 1940 was ten times better and Brennan’s Bean masterly. Newman’s OK, I guess, but…
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3 Responses
An odd film that has its fans, although I’m not one. It does remind me of Cable Hogue story wise (if not quality wise), in that both Cable and Bean build an empire, of sorts, out of nothing in the wilderness. An American Dream, if you will, built by men who’ll stop at nothing to achieve it.
Yes, I suppose there is a similarity.
Thomas Leary’s remark makes me think of John Huston’s major inspiration : the pursuit of happiness’ failure of his heroes as so well expressed in The Treasure of Sierra Madre (or for instance Asphalt Jungle, The Man Who Would be King, no westerns though but he made so few)
I have just rewatched his Roy Bean movie maybe more than 20 years after my last time…
The film (lovely photo by Richard Moore who had made The Reivers and The Scalphunters) is mixing and balancing (hesitating !?) between the farce or the parody in one hand and a tale about the nostalgy of the past in the other hand.
Since the spaghetti’s emergence, good and evil are all mixed up.
The good old times when you had the freedom to make your own law and apply your own justice (aka kill, hang, rob) are soon disappearing because of crooked politicians taking advantage of the laws for their own profit, later assisted by gangsters, cars having replaced horses and oil being the new gold. The judge will come back for a last pyrotechnic fight to go out in style. Lillie will stop in Langtry too late.
Bean is an anarchist (like Huston was) soon a dinosaur, naively obsessed by his dream to meet and love Lillie Langtry.
Except a few moving moments, it is closer to the 1959 Lucky Luke comic album titled simply The Judge than the real story or inspired by it.
It is also very far from John Milius script, style and ideas (very upset by the treatment of his writings by Huston, Foreman the producer and Newman, he wanted Warren Oates instead of Newman and spoke of the film as a Beverly Hills western…).
Most of the characters are closer to caricature. Good actors and great supporting cast though. Jeff could have say a word about Victoria Principal first role far ahead of Dallas…
The judge is using a rarely seen Winchester Model 1901 (also in Monte Walsh and Terminator 2…). I could not identify the scoped rifle he uses to shoot at Bad Bob/Sracy Keach.
There is also an anachronistic M1928 Thompson submachine, since the real Roy Bean died in 1903…
It smells good the 1970s when the western, to survive, had either to be very serious, possibly with some political message (Vietnam etc) or try to be more or less comic and humorous, often cynical and disillusioned in both options, preferably with some weird touches, anyway “revisionist”…
As a matter of fact, the same year of 1972 will see Ulzana’s Raid, Jeremiah Johnson (an other Milius’ script), Joe Kidd, Chato’s Land, Buck and the preacher, The Cowboys, Dirty Little Billy, Junior Bonner, The Revengers, The Wrath of God, When the Legends Die, Molly and Lawless John, Bad Company, The Legend of Nigger Charley The Magnificent Seven Ride!, The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid, The Culpepper Cattle Co., Cry for Me, Billy, Greaser’s Palace, The Honkers, J.W. Coop, Getaway (the latter two modern westerns), probably a few others including TVs… There were many italo-spanish films, West’Germany even from India, Russia and East-Germany that sameyear…
Not sure if Jeff has written about them all!