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Great Film overall

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

An outlaw named Roy Bean appoints himself the judge in a small West Texas town called Vinegaroon, which he renames Langtry in honour of his favourite actress, Lillie Langtry. He also owns the local saloon, The Jersey Lily, which doubles up as his courtroom. He proceeds to dispense his own brand of frontier justice with the aid of his beautiful Mexican mistress Maria Elena, his pet bear and a band of outlaws-turned- deputies, proclaiming himself "the law west of the Pecos", although he has no legal qualifications and has never officially been appointed as a judge. (According to the film, in the late nineteenth century the Pecos River marked the border between civilisation and barbarism; only "bad men and scorpions" lived beyond it). Although Bean acquires the reputation of being a "hanging judge", his rule is welcomed by the townspeople who prefer his version of law and order to no law and order at allRoy Bean was a real-life character, and he really did appoint himself judge in Langtry and dispense justice from the bar of the Jersey Lily saloon. (He was, however, later formally appointed a Justice of the Peace, something never mentioned in the film). It is unlikely that he was as obsessed with Lillie Langtry as he is portrayed here; the town of Langtry was not named after the actress and it is probable that Bean only named his saloon after her because the town already had that name. Maria Elena is a fictional character and there is no evidence that Bean ever had a pet bear. The main part of the film is therefore based on historical fact, albeit only loosely so.The concluding scenes, however, are pure fiction. The action leaps forward from the 1890s to the 1920s. In reality Bean (born in 1825) was considerably older than the character portrayed by Paul Newman (probably born around 1850) and died in 1903. Throughout the twentieth century Langtry has never been anything other than a small village. In the film, however, Bean survives into the Prohibition Era, by which time an oil strike has turned Langtry into a boom town, controlled by a crooked mayor named Frank Gass and his corrupt police force, in league with the gangsters running the illegal liquor trade. Together with his former companions and his daughter Rose, Bean resolves to clean up the town.The ruthless outlaws of the West- Butch and Sundance, Jesse James and Billy the Kid- , as well as dubious characters like Roy Bean, have frequently been portrayed in the cinema and other media as romantic heroes. The gangsters of the twenties and thirties are almost never romanticised in this way- I can't really envisage a "Life and Times of Al Capone"- although the lawmen who fought them, like Eliot Ness, sometimes are. By transporting Bean (unhistorically) from the Old West to the Roaring Twenties, with an entirely fictionalised Langtry standing in for Chicago, to take on the bad guys of that era in a shoot-out, it struck me that writer John Milius and director John Huston might have been making a sardonic comment on American popular culture's often contradictory attitudes to the country's past. The lyrical scene in which Bean romances the lovely Maria Elena (played by a young, pre-"Dallas" Victoria Principal) has been criticised as out- of-place, but to my mind it is in keeping with the generally odd mood of the film, especially as the bear plays a prominent part. It was probably inspired by a similar (if bear-free) scene in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", although the accompanying song, "Marmalade, Molasses and Honey", has never entered the popular imagination in the same way as "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head". (It did, however, gain a "Best Original Song" Oscar nomination). The film was made in 1972, midway between what are perhaps Newman's two best-known films, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and "The Sting". In all three movies he plays a character who is, in one way or another, on the wrong side of the law. Butch is an outlaw, Newman's character in "The Sting" is a conman, and Bean has effectively arrogated judicial power to himself, without any legal authority to do so. All three, however, come across as basically sympathetic- certainly more so than their enemies- largely because Newman throws himself into these roles with such enthusiasm. His persona here is rather different to the cool, detached outsider which was his more regular screen identity. "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is often described as a "comedy Western", but unlike, say, Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles"; it is not a spoof or parody of the traditional Western. It is a comedy in the sense that it is fairly light-hearted in tone, although given Bean's liberal use of the death penalty and his readiness to reach for his gun at the slightest provocation, the comedy is often rather black. Like many Westerns it takes some quite fearful liberties with historical fact, but it ends up as a portrait of the Old West not as it was but as we might have wanted it to be. 7/10

Phantly Roy Bean (c.1825–1903), a West Texas saloon keeper, Justice of the Peace, and the self-proclaimed "Law West of the Pecos," was a colorful rogue whose tall tales and bizarre judicial antics became the stuff of Old West legend and folklore. Hollywood made two westerns about Bean before Huston's, one good, the other not so good: William Wyler's 'The Westerner' (1940), which earned Walter Brennan a Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar as Judge Bean, and Budd Boetticher's forgettable 'A Time for Dying' (1969). Screenwriter John Milius ('Jeremiah Johnson') has always subscribed to the advice tendered by the newspaper editor in John Ford's 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' (1962): "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Unabashedly choosing myth over factual history, Milius created a surreal, broadly comical script that played up the apocryphal reputation of Bean (Paul Newman) as a remorseless and arbitrary "hangin' judge" (the real Roy Bean never hanged anyone). Milius also exercised great poetic license regarding chronology. Roy Bean arrived in Vinegaroon, Texas in 1882 (when he was already 57), founded the nearby town of Langtry in 1884, served as justice between 1882 and 1902 and died in 1903 at the age of 78. In the movie, Bean arrives in Vinegaroon eight years later, in 1890 (and is only 35 at the time), is driven out of Langtry c.1905, and returns in 1925 (age 70) to clear the town of miscreants one last time. Presumably, Milius pushed Bean's life ahead 25-30 years in order to contrast the exuberant lawlessness of the Old West with the more sinister, corporate criminality of the Prohibition era: a revisionist trope already well exercised by Peckinpah, Altman, and other advocates of the anti-western. Though John Milius was disappointed with the film realized from his screenplay—but not with the record $300,000 he was paid for it—John Huston liked the movie, and Paul Newman considered his understated rendition of Bean one of his better performances. Critics panned the film and box office was only mediocre at best. VHS (1999) and DVD (2003).

Paul Newman plays the outlaw who one day, after looking through a law book, decides that he's a judge. He then appoints a bunch of robbers as his Marshalls, hangs posters of a actress all around his bar aka house of law and hangs people left and right. With a beer loving Bear and a hot gal by his side he has a pretty wild life.This is of course a comedy, or at least partly a comedy. It does take time for some drama and a whole lot of action. As the times gets more civilized, the honorable judge Roy Bean never seem to change too much, which is of ill liking of the more sophisticated. Paul Newman gives a solid performance as the half crazed judge, his supporting cast is good as well and we even get great cameos from Perkins, Gardner and Huston himself. I highly recommended watching this one.Overall rating 8.5/10.

I did not think much of this film when I saw it in the seventies. But at that time what I wanted to see was a traditional western like Hawks or Ford would do it. But John Huston was not a director who made conventional films and I failed to appreciate that. As it starts the film states that this might not be what really happened, but what it should have been. And Huston shows us the Judge, excellently played by Paul Newman as the hero, far different from any other movie about him I remembered seeing. They are all great people, the Judge, his deputies, his mistress (Victoria Principal), his daughter (Jacqueline Bisset). And even though Tab Hunter plays a small part, I would say this is his best performance. An unrecognizable Tony Perkins also shows up as a preacher, and Ava Gardner , beautiful, in a beautiful scene. Huston tells us a great, meaningful story, full of emotion,