The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

 

It’s a bit tough to classify The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. It is set in the West, but it’s hardly a typical western film. It borders on slapstick comedy at times, but the entire movie certainly isn’t set up to be funny. There’s even a lovely romance at the heart of the film, but I certainly don’t think that is the main focus here. I’d instead call it a surreal film experience, particularly when different characters start addressing the audience in voiceover narration, some just before they’re hanged (or perhaps, in retrospect, after they’ve been hanged?). The film is allegedly based upon the story of a real-life person named Roy Bean, who set himself up as an ersatz judge in a saloon he takes over from the gang of people who robbed him and tied him to his horse with the expectation of him being dragged to his death. It has to be very loosely based on anything realistic. Bean is played here by Paul Newman, a somewhat unexpected choice given the erratic tone of the film; Newman tended to pick movies that were, shall we say, more consistent? Bean gets help recovering from a local woman, Maria Elena (Victoria Principal, lovely in her movie debut), who decides that she will become his… wife? lover? co-conspirator? Again, it’s not easy to put a label on their relationship since he seems to be interested in other women besides Maria Elena. For example, he’s inexplicably attracted to the famed actress Lily Langtry, whom he’s never met or even seen perform, yet he puts posters of her on all of the walls of the saloon and frequently writes letters to her professing his love for her. Bean, using a single Texas law book as a prop, proclaims himself to be the ultimate determinant of criminality in the tiny town of Vinegaroon, so when a gang of outlaws rides into town, rather than arrest them or hang them (his preferred method of meting out justice), he instead deputizes them as his marshals. What follows is mostly a series of encounters with various famous actors in small roles. For example, Anthony Perkins shows up as the Rev. LaSalle, who encourages Bean to bury the people he’s killed; Tab Hunter is an outlaw captured by the marshals and quickly dispatched for killing a Chinese man (his defense is horrid, but a sign of what was permissible on screen even in 1972); and Stacy Keach appears briefly as an albino gunman who calls himself Bad Bob and wants to kill Bean. The most touching cameo appearance occurs when Ava Gardner, as beautiful as ever, shows up for the film’s final sequence as Langtry, making a stop at Bean’s saloon, now converted to a museum in his memory. She’s able to take her few moments on screen memorable even without much dialogue; what an expressive face she had, a very underrated talent. Other performers make more of an impact and garner more screen time. Ned Beatty is very good as an outlaw who becomes Bean’s bartender and trusted advisor. Jacqueline Bissett, still a relative newcomer to American film at the time, stars as Bean’s daughter Rose, who wants to carry on the family tradition of maintaining the saloon even after her father’s departure. Roddy McDowell as the lawyer Gass has perhaps the most significant supporting role for the second half of the film. Gass comes to town with a deed stating that he owns the property that Bean took from the saloon folk who tried to kill him; he slowly insinuates himself into the town’s life so that he can gain more control, even managing to befriend the ladies who were saloon girls (I think we know what that means) when they arrived in town. The oddest cameo has to be by John Huston, the film’s director, who makes a brief appearance in the film as mountain man Grizzly Adams (yep, just a couple of years before the movie and TV series with Dan Haggerty), never really showing his face but leaving behind a bear who likes to drink beer and who becomes a companion for Judge Bean. He even takes the bear on a picnic with Maria Elena, and at some point, everyone (bear included) has a turn in a swing and on a seesaw. It’s this random sequence that features the source of the film’s sole Oscar nomination, the song “Marmalade, Molasses & Honey,” which, despite its pedigree of having been written by such talented people as Maurice Jarre, Alan Bergman, and Marilyn Bergman, is instantly forgettable. It’s sung by Andy Williams as if it’s one of the filler tracks on an album of easy listening music that few people were going to purchase at that point in his career.

Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song (“Marmalade, Molasses & Honey”)

Shaft (1971)

 

The opening sequence of Shaft clearly establishes Richard Roundtree as a star and his character John Shaft as the fascinating central focus of our attention. Clad in a brown leather trench coat and walking with a determined swagger, Roundtree’s Shaft emerges from the subway and walks through Times Square under movie marquees featuring films with white actors. Director Gordon Parks slyly inserts Shaft into movie history here by proclaiming in the opening sequence that, yes, this is a movie with a black lead character, and it’s going to be a different kind of film from those on the screens in New York City in the early 1970s. It certainly helps to have Isaac Hayes’s percolating “Theme from Shaft” to underscore Roundtree’s walk, a welcome musical and lyrical introduction to the film and the character. John Shaft is a private detective who’s hired by crime boss Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn, almost Shakespearean in his venality) to find his kidnapped daughter, this despite attempts by a couple of Bumpy’s men to kill Shaft earlier in the film. At Bumpy’s suggestion, Shaft unites with Ben Buford (Christopher St. John, father of actor Kristoff St. John, who was almost as stunningly good looking as his dad), a leader of a black “militant” group similar to the Black Panthers, to find Bumpy’s daughter. (Every group who wanted equal rights at the time was labeled “militant,” it seems.) It turns out that the Mafia have taken the girl, and according to Shaft’s friend in the NYPD, Lt. Vic Androzzi (Charles Cioffi), the tensions between the two criminal groups from opposite ends of the city are threatening to start a race war. The reasons behind this impending war are perhaps a bit murky, but it’s not those details that make this an exciting film. It’s the action, and Shaft has lots of gunfire and fighting and what must have been pretty violent stuff for the time period. The film also features some very interesting moments involving race relations, and many of them feature some sly humor. For example, when Lt. Androzzi holds up a black pen to Shaft’s face and says, “What is it with this black shit, huh? You ain’t so black,” Shaft holds up a white coffee mug to Androzzi and responds, “You ain’t so white either, baby.” The location shooting in New York lends the film a sense of authenticity, down to the unexpected real protest against the New York Times that Parks managed to capture for the opening sequence, and the numerous supporting characters, such as the many informants (like Antonio Fargas before Car Wash and the TV series Starsky & Hutch), keep the plot moving briskly. The few women in the movie are only incidental to the plot; they’re primarily there as objects for Shaft, who has sex with a couple of different women, never professing emotional attachments to any of them. Of course, James Bond was bedding multiple women in every 007 movie at the same time, but it must have been (and still must be) a surprise for some viewers to see a black male lead character engaging in the same behavior. Movies like Shaft don’t often get recognized for their award-worthy costume design, but even though it might not be a very practical outfit for taking down the Mafia, Shaft looks damn good in the black leather he wears for the latter part of the movie. The film is oddly progressive for when it was made. As an example, I would point out that when Shaft is looking for a couple of Mafiosos in a Greenwich Village bar, there’s a bit of witty interchange or banter between him and a gay bartender. I’d almost characterize it as playful, making this one of the few movies of its time that didn’t traffic in homophobic attitudes towards its gay characters. In a sly nod to other directors like Hitchcock who made brief appearances in their own films, Gordon Parks managed to cast himself in a cameo role as a landlord. It’s a fun moment in a film that holds up well overall despite some of the dated slang that the characters use at times. Shaft was so successful that it spawned two sequels, a sequel/reboot, and another sequel/reboot, all of them grounded in the original mythology of the 1971 film and all of them starring or featuring Roundtree. Oscar Trivia Note: Isaac Hayes was the first African American to win an Oscar for Best Original Song (for the theme song) and only the third African American to win an Oscar in any category (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier).

Oscar Win: Best Original Song (“Theme from ‘Shaft’”)

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Original Dramatic Score

The Omen (1976)

 

The Omen is quite a trippy horror movie about a little boy who is apparently the spawn of the devil. Gregory Peck plays Robert Thorn, an American diplomat who is stationed in Rome with his pregnant wife Katherine (Lee Remick). She gives birth to a boy, but the child dies. A devious hospital chaplain offers Robert another child who was born at the same time but whose mother died in childbirth—or so he says. Robert agrees to the exchange without getting any documentation, proving that you should always, always get the receipts, and he never tells his wife about the swap. As the child grows up, weird stuff starts happening. The child, who is named Damien, doesn’t really talk a lot during the film, but there’s a lot of strange action surrounding him. His young nanny hangs herself in front of all the guests at Damien’s fifth birthday party in some sort of weird tribute/sacrifice. A weirdly intimidating Rottweiler shows up, as does Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw), a wild-eyed new nanny who is fiercely protective of this odd little boy (played by Harvey Stephens). Baboons attack the car when he and his mother go to a wildlife park, and Damien goes crazy when they try to take him to a church. The strangeness just never seems to end. Remick’s Kathy starts to think she’s going crazy, and both she and Robert dismiss all of the signs they keep getting that something is definitely… off… about their kid, much to the frustration of the audience who has seen too many strange things happen to avoid reaching a conclusion about Damien long before the movie confirms it. Robert, in particular, even keeps ignoring the warnings from a priest, Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), but after the priest dies mysteriously, Robert joins a photographer/journalist (the great David Warner) in tracking down clues about Damien’s origins. What they find is certainly unexpected, one of the best shocks that I’ve seen in a horror movie. All of this is, of course, allegedly based upon what the Bible predicts about the Antichrist. I can’t personally vouch for the accuracy of how the scripture is used throughout the movie, but I suspect its mostly hokum twisted for the sake of the plot. Thankfully, Peck has the necessary gravitas to make much of this crazy stuff seem plausible. Remick, always such a luminous and intriguing presence in whatever role she plays, is quite effective in the smaller part of the long-suffering wife; her exit from the film’s narrative is a sad, sad moment indeed. Much as I hate to perpetuate what might have led to his failure to have a longer Hollywood career, Stevens is just creepy, which I guess is a some sort of plus for a movie about the Antichrist.

Oscar Win: Best Original Score

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Original Song (“Ave Satani”)