52/72: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN

 by Anthony King

All those things which come natural to men became crimes.

There are those films whose reputations precede them; films where the bar had been set in place years before I saw them. This is something I've written about several times in the past. It's a me problem. Art, people, restaurants, or any other thing in life doesn't deserve such judgment before being experienced. But hey, we're humans. Judging is what we do best. And judging is what Roy Bean did best. For better or worse. Self-described as “The Only Law West of the Pecos,” Phantly Roy Bean Jr. was a character that seemed more legend than real. He was a justice of the peace who also ran a saloon in which he ran his court. After his death in 1903, his legend grew, well beyond the reality of who he really was and how he really lived. He became known as a hanging judge, but really only sentenced two men to hang. John Huston's film tells the legend of Roy Bean.

The film opens with Bean (Paul Newman) riding into Vinegaroon and entering a saloon. He's beaten, robbed, noosed, and dragged off by his horse. He's rescued by Maria Elena (Victoria Principal), returns to Vinegaroon, and gets his revenge. He appoints himself judge and takes over the saloon, which he renames The Jersey Lilly after east coast entertainer Lillie Langtry with whom Bean is obsessed. The film is essentially a series of events in Bean's life and introduces several legendary characters played by well-known character actors of the time including Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter, Bill McKinney, Stacy Keach (in one of his greatest performances ever as the albino gunslinger Bad Bob), Huston, Richard Farnsworth, Jacqueline Bisset, Roddy McDowall and Ava Gardner.

Roy Bean is a movie about the wild west, the expansion of America, and frontier justice. That alone sounds like something John Milius would've written. And he did. The film opens with a man being beaten and left for dead before returning to kill his assailants. The man then claims the town his own and disperses justice as he sees fit, complete with public executions. While I like Milius, Huston, and Newman, my gripes (read: baggage) with this film are twofold: 1.) It doesn't go hard enough; 2.) It goes hard enough that it's unsettling how MAGA it feels.

The last person I think of when I think of John Milius is John Huston. The same goes for the inverse. Both men probably thought similarly about the other. Milius wrote his script with himself in mind to direct and Warren Oates as Bean. This alone would take the film into the “harder” territory I found myself craving. It's no secret Milius is right-leaning in his politics which bleeds into his scripts. He wrote about “men's men” starring “men's men.” The Devil's Eight (1969) starring Christopher George; Evel Knievel (1971) starring George Hamilton; Jeremiah Johnson (1972) starring Robert Redford; Dillinger (1973) starring Oates; Magnum Force (1973) starring Clint Eastwood; The Wind and the Lion (1975) starring Sean Connery; Big Wednesday (1978) starring Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt, and Gary Busey; Apocalypse Now (1979) starring Martin Sheen; Conan the Barbarian (1982) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those who know me and my writing know I am not a “man's man.” I am decidedly anti-dude bro. I am also decidedly not right-leaning. Quite the opposite. Yet I love a Milius script. He writes men very well. Stereotypical, sure. Toxic, sure. Milius, though, is able to transfer the not-so-great traits of these types of men to the screen very well. So the character of Roy Bean that he wrote with Oates in mind to star would've been your typical Milius dude. Against his wishes, though, the producers hired Huston to direct and Newman to star.

John Huston is a director who told stories of another type of “man's man.” The Hollywood version. Huston directed movies starring Bogey, Burton, Connery, Nicholson, Hayden, Keach, Gable, Peck, and Lancaster; Hollywood-created “men's men.” These are the Milius type. So to marry Milius and Huston was like mixing oil and vinegar – a recipe that could work given proper other ingredients. Unfortunately, the other main ingredient ended up being Paul Newman – not quite a Huston man's man, but definitely not a Milius man's man. I love Newman, and I love Newman as Roy Bean. Newman is not the Roy Bean that Milius wrote, though. And knowing that Oates was the intended target for the character, I can't get out of my head knowing how much better that would've been. While Milius writes characters that transfer well to the screen, Huston is one of our most cinematic directors. Huston was able to transport the viewer into the world he was creating for the screen. When I watch The African Queen (1951) or The Maltese Falcon (1941), or The Unforgiven (1960), I'm immediately immersed in the jungle, I'm sitting in Sam Spade's office, or I'm on the hunt with Lancaster in the wild west. The same goes for Roy Bean: I'm in The Jersey Lily watching the judge dole out his unjust justice; I'm standing in front of a hanging corpse for a picture. Huston and Newman can't help making it palatable for the general movie-going crowd, though. The montage featuring an Andy Williams song while Bean and Maria picnic with a bear warrants an eye-roll. The pancake makeup and wig powder as Bean grows older is laughable. These are things that kept the film out of masterpiece territory for me.

The second piece of baggage I brought into the film (that I wasn't expecting) was how close it felt to real life at the moment. I won't spend anything more than a short paragraph on the subject so as not to send myself into a spiral of fear. Roy Bean took over the town of Vinegaroon and made up his own laws. When Grizzly Adams (John Huston) showed up outside of town to dig his own grave, Bean says, “There'll be no illegal dyin' in my town.” The line is funny. The exchange is classic Huston. But Bean is serious. Whatever silly laws he could conjure out of thin air he would enforce. And then to publicly execute the men who broke those laws is, again, funny how Huston films, but terrifying if you spend more than a minute thinking about it. There are places in the world in 2024 like Vinegaroon with leaders who are doing the same thing as Roy Bean. And there are people of power in our country who want to do the same thing. I suppose if Milius was granted his wishes and the film went as hard as I hoped I might have regretted that hope. That's one of the reasons I've never watched Red Dawn (1984).

The longer The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean sits with me the more and more I love it. It may not be what John Milius had intended, and he may not have liked the final product, but that final product turned out to be something between a classic story of the wild west and a revisionist western. Milius set out to make a movie about bad men in a bad world. Huston dressed it up and gave it a classic Hollywood flare that skirted anti-Hollywood.