Outlaw and self-appointed lawmaker Judge Roy Bean rules over an empty stretch of the West that gradually grows, under his iron fist, into a thriving town, while dispensing his his own quirky brand of frontier justice upon strangers passing by.
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CinemaSerf
7
By CinemaSerf
It was always going to be difficult for anyone to beat Walter Brennan’s feisty effort as this character from 1940, but Paul Newman and John Huston come close with this slightly contradictory portrayal of the 19th lawman. We start as he, himself, only narrowly escapes a vigilante squad who didn’t much like the cut of his gib and then returns to exact his own vengeance. A chance encounter with “LaSalle” (a barely recognisable Anthony Perkins) sets in train his ruthless reign over a territory that saw him use the rule of law to coax, cajole, threaten and downright extort from anyone who had the misfortune to pass through so he could expand his hick town into something that, believe it or not, did actually have some semblance of law and order to it - providing you were prepared to swear an oath to Lily Langtry. Of course, as we know, absolutely power can corrupt and as his reputation grew the place attracted those worthy and those deadly, and it’s soon those latter folks as well as a fondness for “Maria Elena” (Victoria Principal) that look like changing things. It’s quite a confusing plot, this. On the one hand he’s a ruthless and violent man who thinks nothing of hanging and shooting - just ask the scene-stealing Stacy Keach, on the other hand he does have a code of decency that does want his town to become gentrified. It’s that paradox of styles that helps this to work, but that also illustrates just how difficult it was for anyone to “civilise” an aptly named Wild West where an horse or a wallet was worth way more than a man’s life. There are plenty of familiar faces popping up here, but none that really epitomise the genre which is a shame. Still, Newman is on good form for the first hour or so before the pace starts to fall away and the whole thing starts to become a bit flat before there’s a lively denouement and the arrival of the star of the whole thing, and boy does she positively glow! It’s a good film, just not a great one, and I’m afraid I’m still with Brennan on the best Judge Roy Bean.
