A spec sale sensation in its day and you can see why – it’s vivid, exciting writing, rich in detail and incident. Milius had a marvellous gift for dialogue and big print (he frequently addresses the reader, i.e. “I ask you, what would you do” or “those were the times”), and had a real vision. It’s also artistically bold – there are several narrators, including one who is dead, plus asides to the reader, different dialogue. There’s no other Western quite like it, at least none that I can think of, with it’s crazy, funny Judge Roy Bean character and his weird adventures, full of humour, ruthlessness and history.
It certainly doesn’t fit the classic “hero’s journey” paradigm. Once Bean establishes himself in town (an outlaw who they try to hang, he gets revenge and decides to become a judge), it’s an episodic tale. Bean deals with some outlaws (turning them into his servants), Black Bart (here not an albino), Grizzly Adams, a drunk bear (very funny even if I kept wondering how they’d shoot it), a lawyer who says he owns the land. He marries his underage Mexican girlfriend and tries to visit Lily Langtry the night said wife is to give birth. He gets mugged so misses Lily, then his wife dies and he’s run out of town. At which point you feel the film would end but there’s a tacked on bit where Bean turns up to help his daughter fight gangsters and dies (entertaining, but it jars – did Milius include this soas to praise Teddy Roosevelt), and Lily Langtry visits. But for all it's faults this is a remarkable script from an under-rated writer.
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