The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

Plot

Outlaw Roy Bean rides into the West Texas border town of Vinegaroon by himself. The customers in the saloon beat him, rob him, toss a noose around him, and let his horse drag him off, though he manages to survive.

A young woman from a local Mexican village, Maria Elena, finds and helps him. Bean promptly returns to town and shoots all those who wronged him. With no law and order, he appoints himself judge and "the law west of the Pecos", becoming the townspeople's patron. A traveling preacher, LaSalle, buries the dead.

Bean renames the saloon The Jersey Lilly, and hangs a portrait of Lillie Langtry, a noted actress and singer of the 1890s, whom he has never met but idolizes. Maria Elena is given a place to live and fine clothes ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalog. When a band of thieves comes to town (Big Bart Jackson and gang members Nick the Grub, Fermel Parlee, Tector Crites, and Whorehouse Lucky Jim), rather than oppose them, Bean swears them in as lawmen. The new marshals round up other outlaws, then claim their goods after Bean sentences them to hang. Prostitutes are sentenced to remain in town and keep the marshals company.

Dispensing his own kind of frontier justice, Bean lets the marshals hang a murderer named Sam Dodd, and share his money. When a drunkard shoots up a saloon, Bean does not mind, but when Lillie's portrait is struck by a bullet, he shoots him dead immediately. Finding money in the corpse's pockets, he fines the drunkard for discharging a firearm in a public place and pockets the money.

As time passes, new buildings are constructed in Bean's name, more citizens settle in, and eccentric visitors arrive. A mountain man called Grizzly Adams gives Bean a bear (named Zachary Taylor after the 12th president of the United States, but later renamed the Watch Bear) as a pet. Later, notorious albino outlaw Bad Bob comes to town and challenges Bean to a showdown. As Bob approaches the saloon, expecting Bean to emerge, Bean snipes him in the back from the upper floor of a barn. When a lawyer named Frank Gass shows up claiming the saloon is rightfully his, Bean puts him in a cage with the bear but eventually concedes to let him set up his own legal practice after the citizens get the bear hooked on beer. One evening, a drunken bear pursues a man through the saloon, leading to both of their deaths.

Production

Writing

The film was based on an original script by John Milius, who hoped to direct with Warren Oates in the lead as Roy Bean. "I wanted to make it very cheap," he said. "Shoot in Spain. In some crummy little town, a Sergio Leone leftover and have Warren be the Judge." The script was sent to Lee Marvin who was making Pocket Money with Paul Newman; Newman read the script and became enthusiastic about starring. The producers were not keen on Milius directing and paid a record price to own the script outright – $300,000. Milius later said he liked John Huston but thought that he completely ruined the movie. He was angry at the casting of "cutesy-pie" Paul Newman and felt Warren Oates would have been more suitable.

Milius later elaborated:

Judge Roy Bean has been turned into a Beverly Hills western. Roy Bean is an obsessed man. He's like Lawrence of Arabia. He sits out there in the desert and he's got this great vision of law and order and civilization and he kills people and does anything in the name of progress. I love those kind of people! That's the kind of people who built this country! That's the American spirit! And they say, 'What you've created is a reprehensible man. We've got to make him much more cute.' So they changed it from a Western about royalty and greed and power to a western where Andy Williams sings a song in the middle of the movie and the judge and his girl and a pet bear go off on a picnic. It's incredible. He goes on a picnic and sits on a teeter-totter. It's a movie about Beverly Hills people. About John Foreman and John Huston and Paul Newman.

Milius also said Huston "would explain what he was doing to me all the time. We had a strange relationship. He tortured me constantly, changing things and doing scenes, I thought, deliberately wrong. At the same time, he would explain his options and why he made the decision he made, right or wrong; or the different ways he could have done it. I watched the way an atmosphere was created on the set, watched the way he would respond to an actor resisting him and the way he dealt with an actor going along with him too easily. How he would deal with bad actors. I remember one time when he had someone he said was the worst he'd ever had, and I asked him, what do you do? And he said ‘Not a damn thing, I have no idea.’ He just went back to his trailer." Milius said there "was a terrific amount of humor in the original screenplay. More humor than was in this one (the movie). But it still had a feel that was closer to say a Sergio Leone movie... The Good, the Bad and the Ugly would probably be a good example." Milius claimed the experience prompted him to go into directing "out of self defence and a desire to control".

Casting

"My God is Paul Newman a good actor," said John Huston. "He's just marvelous in this picture. He's never done anything quite like this and yet he's caught something unique and original. The picture definitely says something about a spirit of the past. There's something uniquely American about the judge."

Watch Bear was played by Bruno, an American black bear that had played the lead in the 1967–1969 TV series Gentle Ben. Paul Newman thought that Bruno stole every scene in which they appeared together, an opinion shared by some reviewers.

Filming

Filming took place at various locations in Arizona, and at Old Tucson Studios.

During shooting, Anthony Perkins had an affair with Victoria Principal, who was making her film debut. He later married Berry Berenson. "I think we've got a hell of a picture," said John Huston. "I think it will be very popular. Of course I've been wrong before, but there's a grand sort of thing about it. The wind blows through it. The story is a complete departure from reality, a pure fantasy." The film was budgeted at $3 million, but costs increased due to insertion of a final sequence not in the original script and extensive post-production editing.

Reception

Box office

The film earned estimated North American rentals of $7 million in 1973.

Critical response

Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that it "doesn't have much flow and keeps stopping and starting." Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "so entertaining and so vigorously performed, especially by Newman in the title role, that its pretensions become part of its robust, knock-about style." Variety wrote "The two-hour running time is not fleshed out with anything more than scenic vignettes, sometime attempting to recreate the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with an Alan and Marilyn Bergman-lyricked tune and Maurice Jarre's music, sometimes attempting honest spoofing of western, and sometimes trying to play the story historically straight. The overkill and the undertone do it in." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two stars out of four and wrote "Not the 'bawdy' gags, nor the 'Marmalade, Molasses and Honey' musical interlude sung by Andy Williams, can hide the essential flaw in Roy Bean: He is a blind, egotistical jerk who gets off by hanging people." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Arguably overlong, arguably self-indulgent on occasion, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is nonetheless happily as intent upon being fun as it is in being significant. As Bean, Newman may not seem quite dumb enough but is genuinely moving and has great authority. Surely his performance here is a high point in a notable career." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post declared the film "a big name bummer. I spent the better part of an exceedingly slow two hours fighting recurrent attacks of drowsiness...The episodic structure is undermined by too many episodes that depend on crude jokes, dumb wheezes and gratuitous killing. As the scenes and the would-be 'colorful' characters flop and repeat themselves, one's interest begins to evaporate." Clyde Jeavons of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote "Now and again, thanks to the choice of an episodic style and the use of an engaging crop of guest stars in cameo roles, there are glimpses of what might have been; moments when the film looks as if it might take off like Butch Cassidy or say something meaningful like Little Big Man...But these are small oases in a large desert, and no matter how dismissive John Huston may choose to be about his film, it has the air of an elaborate mistake—overblown, tedious and over-emphatic."

The film holds a score of 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 10 reviews.

In popular culture

The music cue from the film, entitled "Miss Lily Langtry" and composed by Maurice Jarre, appears in the 2019 movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and is included on the film's soundtrack.