"The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" (1972)

 

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The passage of time, if not actual circumstances, has thrust the mantle of freebooting greatness upon Roy Bean, the Kentucky-born (circa 1825) scalawag who, in the 1880's, settled in what was then Vinegaroon, Tex. Bean immediately styled himself pudge and then set about to being law and order to the lands west of the Pecos, principally by hanging those passers-by (a lot of whom were outlaws) who had any money or property to bequeath him.

At least that's the legend that John Huston, the director; John Milius, the screenwriter, and Paul Newman, the star, Have turned into the elaborate, tall-tale Western that opened here yesterday. "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is six parts movie carnical, complete with a performing bear, and one part somber chronicle about the promise and disillusion of an especially giddy American Dream.

Any movie that dares cover so much ground and draw attention to its historical significance, has to be out of its mind in this day and age. It leaves itself wide open to charges of pretentiousness. Yet "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is so entertaining and so vigorously performed, especially by Newman in the title role, that its pretensions become part of its robust, knock-about style.

Although the real-life Roy Bean died in 1903, Mr. Milius's screenplay is purposefully vague about dates and eras. The film seems to cover the entire history of Texas as reflected in the growth of Vinegaroon, which we see first as a single barroom-whorehouse for outlaws, set in a wasteland of almost comic bleakness, then as a prosperous frontier town, a booming oil community and, finally, after the literally catacylsmic fall of Roy Beau (who takes the town with him) as a dusty museum in a way-station now known as Langtry, Tex., named for the Judge's most famous pen pal, Lily Langtry.

Mr. Huston himself shows up in one of the many loosely connected episodes that make up the film's structure—playing (over-acting might be more accurate) a mountain man whose chief purpose in the film is to present Bean with the grizzly bear who is a major character. That is, until the night the bear, who cadges drinks at the bar, makes a mistake of breathing what Bean describes as his "bear-foul breath" on a portrait of the idolized Miss Langtry.

Some of the other characters who pass through the film, rather like specialty acts, include Bad Bob the Albino, played by Stacy Keach in a platinum wig that makes him look like Carroll Baker in "Harlow" and the Reverend LaSalle (Anthony Perkins), an itinerant preacher who, on the soundtrack, tells us why he made Judge Bean bury the outlaws the Judge had just shot (". . . because Christ died for all. It was His choice, not mine.").

Tab Hunter turns up as one of the judge's first victims, an outlaw with a terrible stutter and just the slightest sense of injustice in the face of his imminent hanging. "I'm no worse and probably better than the men who are doing this to me," he tells us in voice-over narration. Ava Gardner, looking beautifully worn by life, appears in the film's curious epilogue in which the fabulous Jersey Lily stops by to see the whistlestop that has come to bear her name.

There are times when it seems as if the film wanted to imitate Newman's extremely successful (at the boxoffice) "Butch Cassidy and the Sun Dance Kid." Stuck smack in the center, in a sequence of ersatz lyricism, is a schmaltzy song sung by Andy Williams for no particular purpose other than to give the movie a song to be advertised by. Most of the time, however, "Roy Bean" is a series of improbably genial adventures, to be interpreted only as solemnly as one sees fit.