The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean(USA, 1972) 120 min color DIR: John Huston. PROD: John Foreman. SCR: John Milius. MUSIC: Maurice Jarre. DOP: Richard Moore. CAST: Paul Newman, Jacqueline Bissett, Tab Hunter, John Huston, Stacy Keach, Roddy McDowall, Anthony Perkins, Victoria Principal, Anthony Zerbe, Ava Gardner. (National General Pictures)
This hysterical account of real-life hanging judge Roy Bean, who exacted his own brand of justice out of a saloon in the most godforsaken corner of Texas, is like a tall tale constructed by someone on peyote, or in an opium den. Hollywood Golden Age director John Huston had a career renaissance in the 1970s, whose films seemed to mesh very well with the changing times at the hands of the Hollywood Whiz Kids. His 1970s work is that of a fearless experimenter, which feels as young as those made by his contemporaries.
Case in point, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is made with people addressing the camera, which turns the film into more of a fable. As such, a beer-drinking bear and other weird moments seem perfectly natural in a film set where anyone would go a little mad under these circumstances.
Paul Newman hides behind this great big bushy white beard to play Bean, whose peculiar brand of justice begins when he is robbed at a saloon-brothel and dragged away by horses. He returns at night to shoot everyone that doesn’t run away, and then converts the house of ill repute into his law office west of the Pecos. In addition to having the reputation of a place that metes out tough justice, it also exists as a shrine to stage actress Lily Langtry, whom Bean worships.
The film’s episodic depiction of the frontier gives new meaning to the term “wild west”, featuring a lot of its cast in glorified cameos as oddball characters who makes this town’s weirdness factor seems like everyday occurrences. Huston himself has a great cameo as Grizzly Adams, but Stacy Keach (also the star of Huston’s Fat City the same year) steals the movie as the crazed albino killer Bad Bob, who rides into town shooting at everything. The camera is positioned at Bob’s belly, where suddenly we hear a gunshot, and then see through Bob’s belly to view Bean on a rooftop- he had just blown a hole through Bad Bob! In one great scene, a drunken cowboy is aimlessly shooting his pistol in the saloon, while Bean and his deputies play poker, seemingly oblivious to all the gunfire. But when a stray bullet punctures the giant poster of Ms. Langtry over the bar, everyone simultaneously turns to shoot him.
While the real Roy Bean was obsessed with the image of Lily Langtry (also seen in the movie The Westerner, with Walter Brennan playing the judge), the famed stage actress (played here by Ava Gardner) seems to be a symbol of class and elegance, an exponent of a world that exists in a completely different plane from Bean’s residence. Huston broadly depicts the wild west in a medieval kind of atmosphere, befitting a mythology of the frontier. Where a lot of western history has survived through tales that personify the gunfighters as larger-than-life figures, here is a movie that visually compliments the feel of those tall tales.