Director John Huston’s third film on the countdown (joining #94
The Unforgiven and #93
The Misfits) is
The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean, a satirical portrait of a notorious self-appointed lawman west of the Pecos River, played with gusto by Paul Newman. Roy Bean's a smalltime outlaw who gets jumped by a bar full of even worse hombres and left for dead, but he survives and manages to kill them all. The sketchy desert saloon where the carnage took place kept a gigantic law book for ironic decoration (and toilet paper), but Bean takes a hold of it and decides he will become a judge. Other rascals and lowlifes begin to surround his orbit with a choice of joining up and becoming deputized or facing the justice of the rope and the gun. As Bean’s followers (including Ned Beatty, Matt Clark, and Bill McKinney) and his power grow, so do the foes he must judge and vanquish including Stacy Keach, Tab Hunter, Roddy McDowall, Anthony Zerbe, and John Huston himself as Grizzly Adams. He also falls in love with a local girl (Victoria Principal), though his heart belongs to famous actress Lily Langtree (Ava Gardner). Audacious, funny, and weird.
Pale Rider is Eastwood’s second appearance on the countdown, first as director. It is a sort of cross between
Shane and his own
High Plains Drifter, playing a mysterious Preacher who rides in upon a Biblical pale horse and serves as an avenging guardian angel to a small community of prospectors in the California mountains, including Michael Moriarty and Carrie Snodgress. They are being harassed and threatened by the ambitious LaHood mining company who wants their claims for strip mining and also owns the nearest town, headed by Richard Dysart, his rowdy son (Chris Penn), and his gigantic henchman (Richael Kiel). There were not many Westerns released in the 1980s, a rare fallow period after decades of being a cinema staple and before the mini-boom of the early 1990s, but
Pale Rider made more money than any of them at the box office that decade.
Both of these flicks amassed 59 points.
The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean had four votes, two of them were top tens with a fourth and a fifth place nod, while
Pale Rider was on five ballots including being named somebody’s second overall pick, landing it one spot higher on the countdown.