--- title: The Beaning of Life: 10 Memorable Movie Beans description: From a death-prone English actor to a coffee plantation in Africa, TIME surveys a wide field of famous cinematic beans canonical: https://time.com/archive/7119671/the-beaning-of-life-10-memorable-movie-beans/ author: Gary Susman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2013-03-04T10:45:18.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-16T05:47:49.878Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: The Beaning of Life: 10 Memorable Movie Beans og:description: From a death-prone English actor to a coffee plantation on Africa, TIME surveys a wide field of famous cinematic beans og:url: https://time.com/archive/7119671/the-beaning-of-life-10-memorable-movie-beans/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5e666df06bf0b269/698a8f1318689225696cdc84/moneyball1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1500 og:image:height: 844 og:image:alt: Populist: Moneyball og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Beaning of Life: 10 Memorable Movie Beans twitter:description: From a death-prone English actor to a coffee plantation on Africa, TIME surveys a wide field of famous cinematic beans twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5e666df06bf0b269/698a8f1318689225696cdc84/moneyball1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # The Beaning of Life: 10 Memorable Movie Beans > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Gary Susman](https://time.com/author/gary-susman/) Mar 4, 2013 10:45 AM UTC  Columbia Pictures by [Gary Susman](https://time.com/author/gary-susman/) Mar 4, 2013 10:45 AM UTC From a death-prone English actor to a coffee plantation in Africa, TIME surveys a wide field of famous cinematic beans ## Bean There, Done That 
The release of the new film Jack the Giant Slayer, Bryan Singer's epic retelling of the old Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale, offers a reminder that beans (usually, non-magical ones) have been at the center of many of history's most memorable movies. Sometimes, it's just in a quotable line of dialogue – think Rick getting Ilsa to leave with Victor in Casablanca by telling her that " the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," or Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs offering the helpful catering tip that human liver is best served "with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."



Sometimes, however, it's more than that, as with the bean farming that's essential to the plots of East of Eden and Out of Africa. There's the comic potential of beans, as depicted most indelibly in Blazing Saddles. Finally, there's the word "bean" itself, which has been the name of a number of great movie characters, not to mention movie actors. (Being John Malkovich is unthinkable without the contribution of Orson Bean as the dotty boss.) So let's give the humble legume its moment in the limelight. niennunb ## Mr. Bean 
The word "bean" is just plain funny on its own, especially when uttered by Rowan Atkinson's frog-voiced character, the well-meaning but inept clod at the center of the movies Bean and Mr. Bean's Holiday. Actually, Mr. Bean doesn't speak much; he's a near-silent clown, in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and Jacques Tati, who can be counted on to turn a minor inconvenience into a colossal catastrophe. In Bean, he's inexplicably entrusted with the stewardship of a famous and irreplaceable painting (the portrait popularly known as "Whistler's Mother"). In Mr. Bean's Holiday, his trip across the English Channel for a vacation is practically grounds for France to declare war on Great Britain. In both features, as well as the many Mr. Bean shorts that preceded them, Atkinson's wordless, effortless slapstick and brilliantly escalating gags play well to audiences in any language, and to both kids and adults. He's a resilient Everyman, one who faces the challenges of modern life with a little less brains than most of us but also more resourcefulness and mischief. niennunb ## Sean Bean 
The square-jawed English actor has played countless tough guys (mostly villains, some heroes) and has been regarded as a sex symbol, but what he's best known for is bringing his unique blend of ruggedness, panache, and conviction to death scenes. He's been killed onscreen more than two dozen times, usually in baroque and horrific ways.



He's been impaled with an anchor (Patriot Games), drawn and quartered by horses (Black Death), pushed off a cliff in by a stampeding herd of cattle (The Field), shot point blank while in reading in a church (Equilibrium), crushed by a satellite dish (GoldenEye), and most poignantly, turned into a human pincushion by Uruk-hai archers in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. (There was also his untimely beheading on TV's Game of Thrones, a death that should have been less shocking, not because it happened that way in George R.R. Martin's novel, but because poor Ned Stark was played by Sean Bean. Of course he was going to meet an awful, premature demise.) In fact, it was weird to see him cast as Odysseus in Troy. Sure, he did his usual yeoman's work in the role, but it was off-putting to see him play a character who's still alive at the end of the movie. niennunb ## Freebie and the Bean 
Hard to imagine today that you could get a movie made with that title, or that it would be cast with non-Latino stars like Alan Arkin and Valerie Harper playing characters named "Bean" and "Bean's Wife." Still, lazy racial stereotyping aside, the 1974 movie was actually a decade or so ahead of its time. The title characters (James Caan is Freebie) are partners on the San Francisco police force, hunting down a racketeer before a hit man does the job for them.



The movie is full of the over-the-top slapstick set pieces that would characterize buddy-cop movies like the Lethal Weapon series in the late '80s and '90s. Richard Rush, a director fond of vehicular mayhem (from Roger Corman biker movies in the '60s to the cult favorite The Stunt Man in 1980) stages some spectacular chase moments, including the film's best-remembered scene, where the partners' car flies off an elevated highway and into the living room of an elderly couple's apartment. ("Television is getting too violent," is the punchline grumbled by the oldsters.) The movie spawned a short-lived TV series of the same title in 1980, starring Tom Mason and Hector Elizondo. niennunb ## East of Eden 
Some use beans for nourishment, some for flavor, some to stuff beanbags. But in East of Eden, Cal Trask (James Dean) uses them to try to buy his father's love. In Elia Kazan's celebrated 1955 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel, Cal is forever moaning over his inability to please his father, Adam (the imposing Raymond Massey). After Adam loses a fortune on a vegetable transport business, Cal resolves to make it back for him by investing in bean futures, believing that, with World War I on the horizon, beans will soon shoot up in price. (To add to his Oedipal dilemma, he begs for seed money from his estranged mother, Kate, who runs a brothel in another town.)



The scheme works, and nets Cal a huge windfall. But when he tries to present the money to Adam as a gift, Adam rebuffs him, insisting that he doesn't want the fruits of what he considers to be war profiteering. It's the most fraught crop of frijoles on film until The Milagro Beanfield War 33 years later. It may be hard to imagine anyone getting this worked up over beans, but James Dean could brood like no one else, before or since. niennunb ## The Milagro Beanfield War 
What was it Humphrey Bogart said about the problems of little people and "a hill of beans"? Whatever it was, here's the movie that sets out to prove him wrong. Here, in an arid, remote corner of New Mexico, a penniless farmer (Chick Vennera) impulsively pirates water to irrigate his beanfield, thereby starting a chain reaction that threatens to bring crashing down a coalition of statewide politicians and wealthy real estate developers. Robert Redford's 1988 movie adapts John Nichols' novel of the same name, a book that offered a rich stew of political satire, social anthropology, ribald sex farce, and Mexican-American folklore.

The film version is kind of a mushy, less flavorful, refried-bean version of the book, but there's still plenty to chew on in its David-and-Goliath depiction of a proud people with a vanishing way of life, pitted against vast and impersonal forces of business, bureaucracy, and racial misunderstanding. And the movie contains some memorable performances by Ruben Blades, Sonia Braga, Christopher Walken, and especially Carlos Riquelme, as the old-timer who comes closest to embodying the spirit of his community and of Nichols' magical-realist fable. niennunb ## Out of Africa 
The winy, berry-like flavor of Kenya coffee beans may be easy enough to find these days at the nearest Starbucks, but a century ago, the idea of coffee grown in the Kenyan hills must have seemed a novelty. At least, that's the way Out of Africa presents it. When Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) arrives in Kenya from Denmark in 1913, she's surprised to learn that her new husband, Bror (Klaus Maria Brandauer) has decided to turn their land into a coffee plantation instead of a dairy farm. Everyone else tells the Blixens that they're crazy to grow coffee beans, especially since it'll take years before they have a viable harvest. Making it more difficult for Karen are Bror's frequent hunting and safari trips, leaving her to run the farm essentially by herself.



According to the memoir of the same title by Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dinesen), it took nearly 20 years for the farm to fail, thanks to poor business decisions and the falling price of coffee after World War I. The 1985 movie, however, telescopes the plantation's demise into a much shorter period, climaxing with a cataclysmic fire that destroys both the farm's bean harvest and its roasting factory. Imagine, though, if she'd been able to hold out; the name Dinesen might be better known today for lattes than letters. niennunb ## Blazing Saddles 
Ever wonder why classic westerns showed so many scenes of cowboys eating beans around the campfire but no scenes of that meal's often loud and acrid results? Well, you probably didn't, but Mel Brooks did. "I mean, you can't eat so many beans without some noise happening there," Brooks said at the time. The resulting campfire scene, which seems to feature an endless sequence of cowboys breaking wind, is a landmark, generally considered Hollywood's first fart scene. (In fact, the film is full of fart humor, from the name of Brooks' character, Gov. LePetomane, taken from a 19th-century French performer whose blasts of flatulence were part of his act, to the movie's title, which suggested that the post-bean activity continued once the cowboys were back astride their horses.)



Warner Bros. complained about the campfire scene, and so did movie critics, but audiences guffawed. Thus did 1974's Blazing Saddles make movies safe for fart jokes, thus enabling gross-out filmmakers for generations to come. Somewhere, the folks behind Dumb & Dumber and Bridesmaids are busy thanking Brooks – quietly, we hope. niennunb ## The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean 
Roy Bean was a real-life western character, a self-appointed Texas judge who called himself "the law west of the Pecos" and administered justice from inside a saloon. Walter Brennan won an Oscar for playing him in 1940's The Westerner, and Edgar Buchanan played him in the 1956 TV western series Judge Roy Bean. But the best-known Bean is Paul Newman, in John Huston's highly fictionalized 1972 version of Bean's biography. In this version,



Bean is an outlaw who takes over a small town by force, names himself a law enforcement officer, and enlists other outlaws as his deputies, who capture other desperados and confiscate their loot. Such familiar western characters as Billy the Kid and Grizzly Adams (played by Huston) cross Bean's path. With a two-fisted script by John Milius (who later wrote Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn), Huston and Newman created a raucous, Rabelaisian, revisionist western of the sort popular at the time (see also Little Big Man and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid). The movie also provided early roles for future Dallas stars Steve Kanaly and (in the female lead) Victoria Principal. Critics and audiences gave the film mixed reviews four decades ago, but today, Judge Roy Bean is considered one of the better revisionist westerns. niennunb ## Moneyball 
Billy Beane may be a real person, but the screenwriting gods seem to have given him the perfect name for who he is, the former Major League outfielder (did he ever bean anyone trying to hit the cutoff man?) turned Oakland A's general manager who used his bean instead of his gut to scout players who could fill his roster on a budget – players who regularly got on base but were undervalued by their own teams and by other scouts. As depicted in the Michael Lewis book Moneyball and the film adapted from it, Beane's approach, based on the baseball statistical analysis known as sabermetrics, earned him skepticism and scorn at first. But when it yielded results, the Red Sox came calling with an offer to hire Beane away from Oakland. He declined, but he'd proved his point, and other managers started scouting via sabermetrics as well.



As portrayed on screen, Beane is a little too good to be true: he's a loving dad, a decision-maker who's right most of the time, and he's Brad Pitt. He's also a middle-aged man whose most profound regret is turning down a Stanford education to chase major-league fortune and glory during a playing career that turned out to be all too short. The 2011 movie Moneyball does a good job of making Beane's number-crunching come alive on the diamond, but it also shows Beane himself to be a good vehicle for asking what we really value. niennunb ## Tommy 
Ken Russell's 1975 version of the Who's rock opera is full of the over-the-top visual style he was known for, but no more so ithan in the scene where Ann-Margret (as Tommy's mother) watches her son on TV and hallucinates that the screen spews forth a stream of commercial products (baked beans, chocolate, detergent suds) into her room. The sight of Ann-Margret singing her heart out (the song "Champagne" was composed specifically for the film) while rolling around in a sea of beans and other effluvia is a weirdly sensual, hilarious, disgusting sequence to which words don't do justice.



Russell's inspiration was some commercial's he'd shot early in his career, though Who fans also saw in it a reference to the group's 1967 concept album The Who Sell Out, which features a parody ad for Heinz Baked Beans and a cover photo of singer Roger Daltrey sitting in a bathtub full of baked beans. According to Russell, the number took three days to film. He said the actress' husband objected to the scene, but she threw herself into it, so hard that she slashed her hand on the broken glass of the TV screen. Russell took her to the hospital to stitch up the wound, but she returned to the set the next day. For her trouble, Ann-Margret earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination, though she lost to Louise Fletcher from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest – proving that swimming in a pool of beans wasn't even the craziest thing an actress could do that year. niennunb ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119671/the-beaning-of-life-10-memorable-movie-beans/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119671/the-beaning-of-life-10-memorable-movie-beans/"},"headline":"The Beaning of Life: 10 Memorable Movie Beans","datePublished":"2013-03-04T10:45:18.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-16T05:47:49.878Z","description":"From a death-prone English actor to a coffee plantation in Africa, TIME surveys a wide field of famous cinematic beans","url":"https://time.com/archive/7119671/the-beaning-of-life-10-memorable-movie-beans/","keywords":["movies"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5e666df06bf0b269/698a8f1318689225696cdc84/moneyball1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Gary Susman","url":"https://time.com/author/gary-susman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5e666df06bf0b269/698a8f1318689225696cdc84/moneyball1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Populist: Moneyball","caption":"","creditText":"Columbia Pictures","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/7119671/the-beaning-of-life-10-memorable-movie-beans/","name":"The Beaning of Life: 10 Memorable Movie Beans"}}]}] ```