General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Westerner

The Westerner is a 1940 American Western film directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, starring Gary Cooper as the drifter Cole Harden and Walter Brennan as the self-proclaimed Judge Roy Bean, the real-life Texas justice of the peace who called himself "the Law West of the Pecos."¹ Written by Jo Swerling and Niven Busch from a story by Stuart N. Lake, it was released by United Artists on 20 September 1940 and won Brennan his third Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	20 September 1940, United Artists; premieres in Fort Worth and Dallas on 18 September 1940¹
Principal credits	Director William Wyler; producer Samuel Goldwyn; screenplay Jo Swerling and Niven Busch, from a story by Stuart N. Lake; cinematography Gregg Toland¹^•²
Lead cast	Gary Cooper (Cole Harden), Walter Brennan (Judge Roy Bean), Doris Davenport (Jane-Ellen Mathews), Fred Stone (Caliphet Mathews), Lilian Bond (Lily Langtry)¹
Academy Awards	Brennan won Best Actor in a Supporting Role, his third; the film was nominated for Best Original Story and Best Art Direction¹^•³
Cost	Daily Variety reported approximately $2,000,000; TCM states Goldwyn budgeted the film at $1 million¹^•²
Runtime and format	98 or 100 minutes, black and white, Western Electric Mirrophonic Sound, 10 reels¹
Critical standing	100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (7 reviews); Metascore 78 on Metacritic⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot

Cole Harden, a wandering cowhand, is brought before Judge Roy Bean on a charge of horse stealing, a capital offense in Bean's court. He saves himself by pretending to know Lily Langtry, the British actress who is the idol of Bean's life, known as "the Jersey Lily," and Bean reverses the death sentence.¹ Setting out for California, Harden meets the homesteader Caliphet Mathews and his daughter Jane-Ellen and becomes involved in the homesteaders' struggle against the cattle ranchers, whose law behind them is Bean himself.¹

Harden persuades the judge to remove the cattle from the homesteaders' land in return for a lock of Lily's hair, but Bean and his gang then burn the homesteaders' fields and trample Mathews to death when he tries to save his house. Jane vows to remain, and Harden rides to Fort Davis to swear out a warrant for the judge's murder. Bean, though a wanted man, insists on going to Fort Davis to see Lily perform; as the opera house lights dim, Harden comes for him, and the last thing Bean sees is his beloved Lily.¹

The story is set in 1882 in the Texas town of Vinegaroon, where Bean holds his dubiously legal trials in his saloon; in the film, as in history, he renames the town Langtry in the actress's honor.⁶ The film's account of Bean's court is not historically accurate: the real Bean generally preferred fines to executions, though he did run an idiosyncratic justice system with minimal knowledge of the law and no regard for correct procedure.⁶

Production

Cooper's reluctance. Cooper was at first uninterested in playing Cole Harden because early drafts of the script revolved around Bean. "I couldn't figure for the life of me why they needed me for this picture," he said. Screenwriters Niven Busch and Jo Swerling expanded the role, with additional material from the playwright Lillian Hellman, but Cooper remained unsatisfied until Goldwyn threatened to sue him for violating his contract; Cooper then agreed to play the lead, he said, "with the express understanding that I am doing so under protest."² AFI's history adds that modern sources credit Lillian Hellman and Oliver La Farge with rewrites on the script.¹

Location work. Goldwyn budgeted the film generously for a Western and allowed four weeks of location shooting eight miles outside Tucson, Arizona, in a town built expressly as headquarters for the crew; the then governor of Arizona, R. T. Jones, attended the founding of the new town.²^•¹ Goldwyn also funded the herding of 7,000 head of cattle, at that time the most ever gathered for a motion picture sequence.² Shooting was briefly delayed when Cooper was injured in a fall from a horse, and in February 1940 director Lewis Milestone and photographer Rudolph Maté shot additional scenes.¹

Music and casting disputes. Wyler, dissatisfied with Dimitri Tiomkin's score, had Alfred Newman rewrite it, although Tiomkin received sole screen credit.¹ Wyler planned to cast his wife, Margaret "Talli" Wyler, as Jane-Ellen, but Goldwyn insisted on Doris Davenport, who had appeared only in bit parts; the film failed to make her a star, and she retired after one other film, Behind the News (1940).² Onscreen credits list the character played by Dana Andrews as "Bart Cobble," while the Variety review calls him "Hod Johnson."¹

Distribution. Modern sources indicate that Goldwyn sought to have Warner Bros. release the film, but United Artists blocked this move by warning Warners that it would face legal action.¹

Wyler and Toland

For Wyler the film was a return to the genre where he had learned his trade: he directed 21 two-reel Westerns between 1925 and 1927 before abandoning the form after The Storm in 1930, returning to the American West only once more, with The Big Country in 1958.² His collaboration with cinematographer Gregg Toland began strained. "I was in the habit of saying, 'Put the camera here with a forty-millimeter lens, move it this way, pan over here,'" Wyler recalled. "You don't do that with a man like Gregg Toland... He was an artist."² Critics have singled out the result: Time Out called Toland's landscapes superb, and the Chicago Tribune wrote that Toland's cinematography "makes you yearn for what he might have done on a Ford Western."⁷^•⁵

Reception and place in the Western

Contemporary response was strong. TIME called the film Samuel Goldwyn's "most expensive and most successful horse opera" and wrote that Walter Brennan's "penetrating personification of Judge Bean makes The Westerner a cinema event."⁸ Later aggregate scores reflect the same standing: a 100% Tomatometer from seven critics and a 76% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a Metascore of 78 based on six critic reviews on Metacritic.⁴^•⁵

TCM's essay places the film at a turning point in the genre. In the 1940s the Western left behind some of the clear-cut divisions between good and evil that had defined the formula, and The Westerner was, in that account, the first in a series of cowboy pictures that grayed the white hat/black hat distinctions of the genre. The friendship between Harden and Judge Bean, a mixture of trickery, camaraderie, and cold-blooded murder, is the film's true focus, more than the Texas range war or the romance, and it anticipates the paired protagonists of My Darling Clementine (1946), The Outlaw (1943), and Red River (1948).²

Legacy

Brennan's third Oscar made him the only performer to win three Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor.¹ Cooper was not nominated for the film, though he won the Oscar the following year for Sergeant York (1941).² In September 1940, Cooper and Brennan reprized their roles in a Lux Radio Theater version of the story.¹

Judge Roy Bean returned to the screen repeatedly. A character in RKO's 1938 film The Law West of Tombstone was loosely based on him, and the 1972 First Artists production The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, directed by John Huston and starring Paul Newman and Huston, detailed the judge's exploits.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1930 to 1960

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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