The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

#22 in my ranking of John Huston’s filmography.

John Milius, who wrote the script for this film, was reportedly very unhappy with the final result, his ire focusing on particular sillier elements that John Huston inserted, while the overall casting of Paul Newman as the titular Texas figure rubbed him the wrong way (he wanted either Lee Marvin or Warren Oates). His disappointment in the execution of the script led him to push his way into directing as a form of protection, and, you know what? I get it, in regards to this specific movie. I don’t think the film is a disaster, but there’s a goofier element to the portrayal of Roy Bean that undermines the dramatic elements of the film to the point where I think the film simply stops working.

I actually do feel it works quite well for a while, and there’s a moment, right before the introduction of the bear, where I felt like I was going to be on the other side of the audience, cheering this on as a lost gem of Huston’s career. For starters, this felt like the first film since maybe Freud: The Secret Passion that Huston felt like he was really trying something as a whole, not just kind of invested in one segment of the film’s potential while kind of coasting through the rest. This, as opposed to Fat City, feels like the first film outside of Canby’s “tired period” in more than a decade, and that energy and verve manifests in the return of more complex blocking in frame, a greater embrace of complicated camera moves, and more precision in performance creates this palpable sense that Huston was invested at a level that he hadn’t felt in years.

Roy Bean (Newman) shows up at a remote brothel where the men and women rob him and try to lynch him by wrapping a rope around his neck and the pommel of a horse. He survives in the desert, thanks in no small part to the aid of Maria (Victoria Principal), and commits great vengeance upon those that wronged him, intent on taking possession of the application of the law west of the Pecos River into his own hands. He may not know the law itself, but he will exact his own justice nonetheless, as he explains to the passing preacher LaSalle (Anthony Perkins). One of the interesting things about the film that largely gets dropped after a certain point (well, sort of) is that the tale is told from the perspective of people who meet him in passing, almost like it’s a series of vignettes told by those who met him briefly. This really only happens twice with LaSalle and the first man brought to Bean to be hung (the rest of the film is told in voiceover by Tector Crites (Ned Beatty), one of his marshals). I would have liked it if the rest of the movie had kept on with this, including letting Bad Bob (Stacy Keach), who appears in a memorable scene later, take part. Alas, he does not.

This isn’t the first film about Judge Roy Bean I’ve seen recently. William Wyler made one called The Westerner with Walter Brennan playing Bean, and in both Bean’s love of the singer Lillie Langtry (Ava Gardner) is a central tenet of his character. I had assumed that the earlier film had invented it, but I guess it was true. Anyway, he’s as likely to punish someone for blowing a hole in his prized poster of Langtry than anything else, execution style, but his unconventional approach to law enforcement leads to a bustling little community in the spot of dirt west of the Pecos nonetheless.

Milius has gone on record as loving the men who built America using violence to forge a path forward, and there’s a moment that really reflects that that Huston brings to screen wonderfully. In an extended shot, Bean talks with Maria about his vision of the future, looking out over the Texas countryside, envisioning bringing progress and the future to the land just before sundown, almost betraying a certain Malick influence. The problem is that the scene ends with Grizzly Adams (John Huston) randomly showing up to kill himself, shooed off by Bean, and leaving his bear Zachary Taylor. The introduction of the bear ends up being this weird distraction on the action of the film, Huston relying on sequences that mimic some of the musical sequences of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to create this sort of goofy sense of fun immediately after Bean had made this declaration about the future of Texas under his vision.

The film’s first half is essentially the story of a man with a vision, and the second half is less focused and weirder. It ends up being more of a series of random vignettes, including the quick scene with Bad Bob (that it doesn’t include Stacy Keach talking directly to camera about his experiences from beyond the grave is a real missed opportunity) until Bean leaves town completely, only for the film to skip ahead a few decades, replicating some scenes from, of all things, Cimarron, and Bean’s return. I think I might have been more interested in the final moves of the film, with Bean being disgusted with the actual progress made and making his own vengeance on the world going wrong. There’s a real idea here, but I really also feel that the film just lost its way in the second half, the introduction of the bear being the clear delineation between where this film has some focus and where it just begins to meander.

The irony is, I think, that Huston really, really tried with this. The filmmaking is more interesting than it has been since, probably, Freud: The Secret Passion ten years prior, and it really feels like Huston put himself more into this film than in anything else he had made in a decade. He also lost himself in the fun of having one of the biggest movie stars in the world and a bear on set, and he let that come through on the final film. It’s just further evidence to me that Huston kept directing movies because producers paid him to hang out with movie stars, most of whom he was personal friends with.

Rating: 2.5/4