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”)