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 all
Roy 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
