Paul Newman in “The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean”

Watch an extended trailer for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, starring Paul Newman, Anthony Perkins and Jacqueline Bisset.

This is an image from the movie poster for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, featuring Paul Newman as Wild West lawman Judge Roy Bean, holding two shotguns and a revolver, with a noose dangling next to him while he sits on a bear holding a bottle of liquor. This should automatically mandate seeing this film.

John Milius of Apocalypse Now fame wrote the screenplay for this pseudo-Western directed by the legendary John Huston, helmer of The African Queen, among many more. Very loosely based on the Texas hanging judge of history, Newman’s Bean is an unmitigated bastard who keeps his local self-appointed jurisdiction under his thumb, until the townspeople run him out of town tied to the back of a horse. Just their luck, he’s rescued from the Badlands by Maria Elena (Victoria Principal somehow playing a young Mexican girl in her first film), and Roy Bean proceeds to hike back to town and kill everyone in the saloon, putting himself back in charge, even renaming the town Langtry, after his favorite actress Lily Langtry (Ava Gardner). The town becomes a pit stop of mayhem and murder for anyone passing through, and Judge Roy Bean prospers by robbing anyone and everyone unlucky enough to find themselves in his town.

“I know the law. And I have spent my entire life in its flagrant disregard.”

It’s Paul Newman, and that makes it good. Look for yourself.

Also see some Paul Newman action in Buffalo Bill and the Indians or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson.
And see him play another unlikable bastard in Hud.