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

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Historical accuracy takes a pretty significant hit in this Western, but that shouldn't affect one's enjoyment of the film. As he did a handful times in his career, Paul Newman portrays an Old West character bringing order, progress, civilization and peace to the self appointed one horse town of Vinegarroon, Texas, and he doesn't care who he has to kill to get it. The film relies on quite a few one shot cameos of actors who show up only to be gunned down or hung by Judge Roy Bean (Newman). The most outrageous of these occurs when albino Bad Bob (Stacy Keach) rides into town gunning for the Judge. I like to think that Bean's reaction to Bob's insults provided the inspiration for a similar scene in 1995's "The Quick and the Dead".There's also the running story line of Bean's infatuation with actress Lily Langtry who he never gets to meet, though the picture's finale affords a sentimental reaction from the character portrayed by Ava Gardner. Earlier in the story, Snake River Rufus Krile (Neil Summers) had the distinct misfortune to desecrate a poster of Miss Langtry for which he paid dearly. That was a scene to rival Bad Bob's undoing.Victoria Principal made a notable movie debut here as a Mexican senorita who nursed Bean back to health following his first unfortunate encounter in Texas, ultimately moving in and providing him with a child before her tragic end. Following a whirlwind flash forward of twenty years, Jacqueline Bisset picks up the slack as Bean's daughter Rose desiring to keep his legacy alive amid an oil boom ushering out the final days of the Old West.Considering the colorful life of the real Roy Bean, I'm sure many Western movie fans like myself would welcome a modern, more accurate treatment of the legendary judge dispensing law West of the Pecos. I'd certainly look forward to experiencing old time justice as the handmaiden of the law, or vice versa depending on the circumstance.

TITLE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN opened in theaters in the United States on December 18 1972 starring Paul Newman, Victoria Principal, and Anthony Perkins and it will take you 2 hours to watch this movie. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN was a 1972 western film written by John Milius, directed by John Huston, and starring Paul Newman (at the height of his career, between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting). It was loosely based on the real-life, self-appointed frontier judge. SUMMARY: An outlaw, Roy Bean, rides into a West Texas border town called Vinegaroon by himself. The customers in the saloon beat him, rob him, toss a noose around him, and let Bean's horse drag him off. A young woman named Maria Elena finds and helps him. Bean promptly returns to town and shoots all those who did him wrong. With no law and order, he appoints himself judge and "the law west of the Pecos" and becomes the townspeople's "patrone." Bean renames the saloon The Jersey Lilly and hangs a portrait of a woman he worships but has never met, Lillie Langtry, a noted actress and singer of the 1890s. When a band of thieves come to town (Big Bart Jackson and gang members Nick the Grub, Fermel Parlee and Whorehouse Lucky Jim), rather than oppose them, Bean swears them in as lawmen. The new marshals round up other outlaws, and then claim their money after Bean sentences them to hang. Dispensing his own kind of frontier justice, Bean lets the marshals hang Sam Dodd and share his money. When a drunk shoots up a saloon, Bean doesn't mind, but when Lily's portrait is struck by a bullet, the fellow is shot dead on the spot. Prostitutes are sentenced to remain in town and keep the marshals company.QUESTIONS: Who was Maria Elena? Who was the mountain man? What kind of gift did he give to Maria? Why did Bean go to San Antonio? What did the Judge bring back to Maria? MY THOUGHTS: I loved this movie. There was action and drama right from the beginning. I thought the job that Paul Newman did in the role, as Judge Roy Bean was great. This Western had something in it as most Westerns don't and that was comedy. One of the best is when Maria catches the Judge with another woman an she takes after him with a shotgun. I bought this movie however for Victoria Principal and I wasn't disappointed. This was Victoria introduction and she was great. She was very young in this picture but her acting was great. You didn't get to see much of her because it was a Western, however because of her beauty and acting I'm giving this movie 10 weasel stars.

"The Indians must conform to the white man's ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must. They must adjust themselves to their environment, and conform their mode of living substantially to our civilisation. This civilisation may not be the best possible, but it is the best the Indians can get. They cannot escape it, and must either conform to it or be crushed by it. The tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the family and the autonomy of the individual substituted." - Commissioner Thomas Morgan "There is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." - Walter Benjamin "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" tells the tale of Judge Bean, an American outlaw who, in the early 1900s, claimed a chunk of land and made himself self-appointed ruler. With a six-shooter and a law book, Bean then set about taming the Wild West. The film was directed by John Milius, a renowned right-winger, survivalist, gun advocated and self-described rugged individualist. Unsurprisingly, Milius saw Bean as a "necessary evil". His Bean was a man who was "vital" in bringing civilisation to the Old West. Milius' Bean then achieves a kind of tragic grandeur, for his "taming" influences are then swiftly deemed abhorrent by the "new", "modern" civilisation he gives birth to; he's kicked out of his own town come the arrival of the 20th century. This is the paradox of most of Milius' films, which exhibit a certain amount of pride for a certain type of "necessary violence", whilst also decrying the same.What makes "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Beans" interesting, though, is that it was directed by Milius' political opposite, John Huston. Huston's an adventurer very much like Milius, but is also a notorious left-winger. He thus sets about satirising and lampooning everything Milius wrote. This has annoying many critics. Roger Ebert, for example, states that Huston's film "sets out to be an elegy to the passing of the Old West and ends up being an elegy to the passing of bad manners". But this is not true. It is typically the more well-regarded westerns that are wistful, or pine nostalgically for a specific form of violent masculinity. Huston, though, satirises the genre's romanticism and is preoccupied with highlighting how America is grounded on, or was built by, bad manners.And so Huston's film – a kind of remake of Luis Bunuel's "Gran Casino", or rather Wyler's "The Westerner" via "El Topo" - paints America's founders and forefathers as whores, crooks and convicts. His town builders are maniacs and his lawmen criminals. Laws are seen to be an arbitrary thing, naked power, insanity and violence rule the land, nepotism and injustice are rife, an authoritarian, one-man-rule emergency manager is offered as the "solution" for social ills and our heroes are slimy cowards who are less legendary than lowly losers adept at shooting their foes in the back. Huston is not endorsing or glorifying any of these things, though, but mockingly presenting them all as America's true primordial soup. This is how life began.An anti-myth, and resolutely revisionist, the film is also outright goofy. Huston's film, like mainstream Western history, is a ridiculous Tall Tale wildly out of control. It is history reduced to episodic larks, rumbustious nonsense and filled with eccentric, thin, implausible guest characters. It is, in other words, identical to your typical, inane, pop-up-book view of history. Significantly, what replaces Judge Bean's era of sleaze and corruption is yet another era of sleaze and corruption. Huston's film then ends with an audacious segment "in the future" in which a now old Bean is gunned down by bigger fish with bigger guns still: sleazy Eastern businessmen replace a sleazy authoritarian.Milius has the last laugh, though, with a closing coda which Huston dutifully films, unaware of the thematic implications. Here we're introduced to Lily Langtry, a turn of the century celebrity whom Bean idolised. Langtry's symbolic of mankind's longing for unattainable beauty and his preponderance for settling for earthly angels instead. She, in other words, represents the separation between "real law" and "idealised justice", between the gorgeous Langtry and another female character whom Bean eventually settles down with (a half caste prostitute). For Milius, Langtry is a left-wing fantasy, a Utopian idyll, whilst the West's blood, guts, whores and rattlesnakes are the inevitable reality which must be accepted with pragmatism, backbone and resolve. In other words, Milius is trying to sell us just another form of the White Man's Burden: civilization must be forged with the barrel of a gun, a lie which continues to this day (America's new frontiers, Iraq, Afganistan etc). While Huston is right to mock both Milius and the Western genre, the truth of the Wild West was also much more nuanced (John C.H Grabill's photographs, for example, attest to how few gun-belts were actually worn in the Wild West). The West's most important figures weren't the mountain men, trappers, gunmen and cowboys, but simple, resolute souls who spent their days struggling to forge a civilisation by more mundane means. It was pioneer families, religious leaders and missions who built the West. In a way, we have replaced the true heroes of the Old West with the likes of Butch Cassidy, Bean and Billy the Kid. The Old West was the domain of communal endeavours, not unbridled individualism. It was a land conquered by the plough, not only the gun. The stories of the men and women who made their lives in Western valleys and plains may be prosaic, but they are the story of the West itself.7.5/10 – Bean is played by the likable Paul Newman. Newman acted in a number of excellent revisionist westerns ("Hud", "Hombre", Altman's "Buffalo Bill" etc).

Paul Newman plays the outlaw who one day, after looking through a law book, decides that he's a judge. He then appoints a bunch of robbers as his Marshalls, hangs posters of a actress all around his bar aka house of law and hangs people left and right. With a beer loving Bear and a hot gal by his side he has a pretty wild life.This is of course a comedy, or at least partly a comedy. It does take time for some drama and a whole lot of action. As the times gets more civilized, the honorable judge Roy Bean never seem to change too much, which is of ill liking of the more sophisticated. Paul Newman gives a solid performance as the half crazed judge, his supporting cast is good as well and we even get great cameos from Perkins, Gardner and Huston himself. I highly recommended watching this one.Overall rating 8.5/10.