Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

PodBill Just what I expected

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

grantss Uneven but entertaining.An interesting western, directed by the great John Huston. Starts off as a revenge movie, though it is soon obvious that Huston is making more of a comedy than a drama. Some of the scenes that follow are incredibly funny, often in a dark sort of way.However, as the movie develops it starts to take the guise of a social drama, exploring how power corrupts. This, however, is a very short-lived theme.After a point it takes on a sentimental tone and ends with a rush of action. So pretty much every movie genre covered, in less than two hours...This unevenness is quite disconcerting, and unfulfilling. Rather than get a complete moral, we have pieces of many.However, the movie does not lack in entertainment. The first half is great and the ending is very emotional.Not perfect, but it will do.

NORDIC-2 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).

happipuppi13 One thing that seems to come with movies about certain times and dates in history are these annoying,prudent nit-pickers who have to ruin a great movie by saying "this didn't happen and that didn't happen". To quote Client Eastwood at the end of The Gauntlet...nag! nag! nag! Doesn't anyone in this day and age just watch a movie for pure enjoyment and losing themselves in a story? Have we all become a nation of film critics and supposed realists that we have to pick a movie apart for not being 100% historically accurate?! You want the whole true story,then watch a Ken Burns documentary or PBS's American Experience! This movie is absolutely incredible. Starting with the way it is filmed,the scenery is great,in the sense of how empty and bleak yet somehow inviting it is. This has to be watched on a clean DVD copy to really be understood.Paul Newman plays his role so very convincingly,I sometimes forgot it was he being Judge Roy Bean. It seemed like a whole other person had taken over Paul's mind. His vengeful shoot-out in the whorehouse is not your standard western shoot-em up. Unlike in those films,he hits everyone he shoots and it's camera angles make it all the more real.There's so many other great players in this movie,I haven't the room to discuss them all but they do range from great to good. Victoria Principal played a her role so well as a Spanish girl,I mistakenly though she was Judge Bean's daughter later in the film. I don't see how someone finds her performance shallow,her character is a woman from a tiny village in Texas. It's a wonder she knows English at that time.Stacy Keach's brief moment in the film is witout a doubt the funniest scene. His long hair and goofy black clothes make him look like the Edgar Winter of cowboys! I disagree that Ava Gardner seems to old to be Beans object of fascination. Bean was in his late 30s/early 40s at the start and Miss Lily not much younger. She visits his town after Bean is gone,so it's perfectly fine.The overall story is quite riveting and doesn't need to be history book perfect to tell it. The old west from near the end of the 19th century had always had inconsistencies and exaggerations in it's stories and legends. The great point made here is where does upholding the law begin & end? At what point does it go from being just that,to being sadistic and out of control with power? Roy seems to go very far beyond drunk with power. He has his human moments in this movie which actually are moving but mostly he's a man who has placed himself above anything and others. The only thing I'd say that is quite out of place here is the very saccharine song sung by Andy Williams in the playful scene between Newman,Pricipal & the bear. Nothing against Mr. Williams' singing but it's a bit laughable in a movie that's mostly dark with comedic interludes. So for the great look of the film,the acting,the story and the direction of John Huston (who plays 'Grizzly Adams' in the film),I easily give this 10 stars.I don't care about the facts,just how good each player acts. (END)

DoctorStrangelove A lot of people seem to think any undiscovered film - or any movie nobody's heard of starring actors who later became great - must be some sort of misunderstood classic that's simply fallen by the wayside for no other reason than a glut of more recent/more popular movies on the market. While that is occasionally true... I think more often than not, most 'forgotten classics' arrived at their current state because they DESERVE to be forgotten. And "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" is definitely one of those cases.The 60s and 70s produced some truly awful westerns, and we can thank God those decades didn't produce many. This (fictionalized? who knows?) version of the Judge Roy Bean legend has moments of pure tragedy, such as Bean's trip to see Miss Langtry. It has moments of mesmerizing beauty - all of Victoria Principal's screen time. And it has its unique moments of ursine comedy (you never mix bears, beer and glue!) But taken as a whole, and with the inclusion of many off-kilter multiple-character voice-overs - and other commentaries delivered STRAIGHT AT THE CAMERA, sheesh! - "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" puts itself squarely in the MISS THIS column.So do yourself a favor and pay no attention to those commenters posing as ultra-cultured film fans, mining the vaults of unknown genius and praising a "hard to find" movie. (Did I mention it's neither lost NOR rare? I got my DVD for five bucks at a certain Mr. Walton's general store.) Voting nine or ten stars for this mess?? Get real... I have a feeling that, 30 years in the future, those same voters will be waxing rhapsodic about Sci-Fi Channel weekly movies from the late 1990s.