The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

Paul Newman plays the title role in John Huston's surreal, revisionist western as the infamous Texas hanging judge. Upon arriving in the tiny West Texas town of Vinegaroon, Roy Bean draws a moustache on a wanted poster of himself, marches into a saloon, and declares his presence. He is immediately ...more

Opinions on The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean tend to vary wildly, perhaps because the film itself is a huge, uneven (and often unwieldy) hodgepodge. Judge Roy Bean attempts too much; it is allegorical (including a political allegory to Richard Nixon), surreal, ironic, blackly comic, both mythologizing and de-mythologizing, and both brash and ponderous -- so the mixture simply doesn't work. Yet any film directed by John Huston and written by John Milius that aims so high is bound to have a ...more