Life & Times

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) is a film that keeps coming up in my readings, yet one I had never seen until last night. 

There were a number of westerns made in Hollywood in the late-1960s/early-1970s, many of them as unconventional as the time in which they were made (and as unconventional as the times in which they were set?). The westerns of the John Wayne era (1950s) are, by contrast, as conventional as the time in which they were made, though we would never confuse a film like The Searchers (1956) with the "wild west" that preceded it. 

The Searchers is a a story of a Union soldier (John Wayne) returning to his frontier home after the U.S. Civil War to find members of his family killed by Comanche people. It is a film that uses restraint to excuse racism. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) is the very opposite, using racism (sexism, patriarchy, theft, pandering, murder ...) to obliterate restraint.

If McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) is about the end of 1960s idealism, Roy Bean anticipates the deregulated 1980s and that kleptocracies that followed. The wildness of McCabe's west is quietly and comically malevolent. The wildness of Roy Bean is Paint Your Wagon (1965) goofy, but without the Technicolour.