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).
Review of The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
