The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean: 1972, dir. John Huston. Seen on DVD.
I did a really idiotic thing, although in my defense, I didn’t realize it until it was too late. I watched The Wild Bunch for the first time a couple of days before I saw The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. And after you’ve seen The Wild Bunch, most other Westerns will seem terribly contrived and shallow, especially a frivolous, light-hearted sort of Western.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is not so much a Western as it is a fairy tale. John Huston would probably not like my using the term “fairy tale” and would prefer something like “legend” or even “a good yarn” but he’s dead and I can’t do anything nearly as bad to him as colorizing The Maltese Falcon so I don’t care. Besides, if you’re going to begin a movie with a crawl that says “If it ain’t true, it shoulda been,” you have to expect comparisons to fairy tales.
Anyway, Judge Roy Bean is a fairy tale about the Old West, with Paul Newman as eponymous outlaw-turned-judge who watches his courtroom/barroom turn into an annoyingly “respectable” town and eventually … well, I don’t want to spoil the movie. (Although if you really don’t want the movie spoiled for you, in any sense of the word, stay away from that damn Peckinpah the week before.) It was odd to see Newman in the beard, and in fact it made him look rather like Richard Dreyfus, which was sometimes disconcerting.
Judge Roy Bean is a sweet movie, a nostalgic and wistful movie, at times a sentimental movie, and at one point it became cloyingly sentimental and I nearly ripped the DVD out of the player. There was this horrible Seventies song, “Marmalade, Molasses, and Honey,” playing in the background while Newman and Victoria Principal and the bear were picnicking and playing on a swing and in a creek and whatnot. I suspect we should blame Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for this kind of thing. It is very un-Huston-like.
The bear is very entertaining but not as much as Harlan Ellison described in Watching, when he claims that the bear stole the movie from Paul Newman. It is a charming bear, but I was more fascinated by Huston’s small role as Grizzly Adams, the man who left the bear at Newman’s doorstep, so to speak. A bizarre little role, very funny. But it also had weird echoes for me because my dad used to love this show Grizzly Adams that was on TV when I was small; I think it was a spinoff on Little House on the Prairie, or it had that kind of feel to it (I am not going to go look it up to see) … anyway, this character is miles away from any of that Michael Landon-ish slush.
I like watching John Huston act in movies (especially Chinatown) more than I like the movies he’s directed, I have to say. For one thing, later in life he seems to have picked up a nasty misogynistic streak, or at least a tendency to make all the women in his films either saints or whores, which is quite evident in this film. Still, I liked this film more than most of his movies that I’ve seen, except for The African Queen, which is a particular favorite of mine.
The screenwriter is John Milius, who has a very impressive list of credits—Apocalypse Now, Jeremiah Johnson … and later, directing as well as writing, Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn. Well, nobody’s perfect.
Judge Roy Bean is a fun movie, a nice little movie, a very good rental. Of course, it helps if you don’t watch anything beforehand that might overshadow it.