The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

United States

1972

120 Min

Color

1.85:1

English

Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
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PROD John C. Foreman, Frank Caffey

SCR John Milius, C.L. Sonnichsen

CAST Paul Newman, Victoria Principal, Anthony Perkins, Ned Beatty, Jacqueline Bisset, Tab Hunter, John Huston, Ava Gardner, Stan Barrrett, Stacy Keach, Richard Farnsworth, Frank Soto, Jim Burk, Matt Clark, Bill McKinney, Steve Kanaly, Roddy McDowall, Michael Sarrazin

PROD DES Tambi Larsen, Robert R. Benton

Working from a script by John Milius, Huston sketches the life of Judge Roy Bean, first as realism, then legend which becomes myth and ends as nostalgia. In other words, he presents a history of the West as it has evolved in life and art. Huston once said that, when he could not make a living as a painter, he turned to writing and directing films. His fine painter’s eye sees the story progressively as classicism, romanticism, impressionism, surrealism and finally elegy. Unlike most Huston films, its structure is fragmentary, on purpose. We begin with the sod hut that was to become a general store, bar, civic center, and courthouse for “The Law West of the Pecos”; in time a palace of hallucination and eventually a museum where the tidied-up life of Bean is shown to visitors.

Critics had been down on Huston for several years, and after applauding his Fat Cityin 1972, saw _ The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean_ as a resumption of his decline.

The film is full of episodes, each more outrageous than the last. Bean takes up with a huge bear; he hangs a photographer who angers him; he blows daylight through the back of Albino Bob; he has a child by a Spanish girl. Other episodes involve Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter, Ned Beatty and Huston himself. The child grows up to be a spunky daughter played by Jacqueline Bisset not unlike, in spirit at least, Huston’s own daughter Anjelica, and Bean comes to her aid, out of a whirlwind, as it were, when thugs and oilmen take over the town he built.

And of course, the thread that holds the film together is Bean’s romantic love from afar for the great late 19th, early 20th Century beauty: The Jersey Lily, Lily Langtry. Bean never manages to meet his love, but many years after he has disappeared, Lily is touched, when, on a tour of Bean’s town, she is shown his unsent letter to her in the bar-courthouse-museum.

Screenwriter Milius, who had wanted to direct and stayed on location during the filming, complained his “gritty” script had been ruined by what he saw as Huston’s sentimentalism. Huston, himself, said the film reminded him of stories his grandmother told him about her husband John Gore, who spent wild years in the Oklahoma Territories as a drunken judge and, later, a sober saloon keeper. In Laurence Grobel’s The Hustons, John Huston is quoted as saying of the film: It seemed to reflect the old American Spirit that was capable of doing so many unlikely things. There was a breadth and generosity and a carelessness about it that I fostered in the picture. It was an allegory, and the vengeance of the past interested me. My Grandfather would have been quite capable of coming back and destroying a place the way the judge did. I loved the audacity of the film. Full of gallows humor and chapter on chapter of Tall Story, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is a Farewell to the Old West. —Epinions.com

Director

John Huston

Adventure in many forms is the theme of many of John Huston’s films. His characters are constantly searching for “the stuff that dreams are made of” (the famous closing-line of his debut film The Maltese Falcon). Huston glorified this chase despite its frequent disillusionment and false promise, since it represented a flight from the complacent virtues of ordinary life. Like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, Huston regarded civilization as a false surface which thinly veiled a hostile nature. Only those who lived at the edge, on the margins of society were regarded by Huston as fellow travellers. In films as diverse as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle and Under the Volcano, Huston celebrated men who circled the abyss; characters who are driven to plunge head first into the void.
The son of the great theatre and film actor Walter Huston (who would win an Oscar under his son’s direction for his role in The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and crime journalist Rhea Gore… read more

Adventure in many forms is the theme of many of John Huston’s films. His characters are constantly searching for “the stuff that dreams are made of” (the famous closing-line of his debut film The Maltese Falcon). Huston glorified this chase despite its frequent disillusionment and false promise, since it represented a flight from the complacent virtues of ordinary life. Like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad, Huston regarded civilization as a false surface which thinly veiled a hostile nature. Only those who lived at the edge, on the margins of society were regarded by Huston as fellow travellers. In films as diverse as The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle and Under the Volcano, Huston celebrated men who circled the abyss; characters who are driven to plunge head first into the void.
The son of the great theatre and film actor Walter Huston (who would win an Oscar under his son’s direction for his role in The Treasure of Sierra Madre) and crime journalist Rhea Gore, John Huston enjoyed an itinerant youth; exposed to different walks of life while moving through a variety of careers. As a contract screenwriter for Warner Bros. he worked on films such as Jezebel, Juarez, Sergeant York and High Sierra. The latter film, directed by Raoul Walsh, was the first starring role for Humphrey Bogart who would become a regular collaborator, a close friend and the star of Huston’s directorial debut – The Maltese Falcon. This adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s classic novel is celebrated as an iconic film noir; sparking as many imitators as Citizen Kane, another debut film made the same year.

Huston’s success as a genre film-maker did not steer him away from his natural eclecticism and thirst for challenge. His most adventurous work in the 1940s is perhaps his war documentaries. Serving in the United States Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, Huston made groundbreaking films such as Report to the Aleutians and The Battle of San Pietro. Its technical innovation in cinematography and raw depiction of armed combat influenced many succeeding films about war, fiction and non-fiction alike. His most controversial documentary, Let There Be Light, was cited by Huston, in his autobiography, as a transformative experience. It marked a lifelong engagement with psychology; directly inspiring Freud, his 1962 biopic about the psychoanalyst’s early career. It’s setting in a psychiatric hospital which treated returning soldiers who suffered from shellshock was regarded by the Signal Corps to be demoralizing to the United States Army and the American public. As a result, the film was shelved and withdrawn from public exhibition until 1980.

The post-war career of Huston followed two alternating currents of studio projects and personal works, many of them adaptations of literary classics. Shot in Ireland, Moby Dick was a difficult but rewarding production; its innovative cinematography by Oswald Morris resulted in one of Huston’s most expressive uses of colour. His most consistent period extended from Fat City (1972)to Wise Blood (1979), tough intimate dramas of failure and defeat. This cycle ended with Under the Volcano, perhaps the darkest of Huston’s gazes into the abyss. The Dead, his final film, made on his deathbed with the help of his children and an oxygen tank, is a work of serene majesty and rousing beauty. —Mr Bongo

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