Jeremiah Johnson
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Movie Reviews of Jeremiah Johnson
Movie Review: "Where you headed?" "Same place you are, Jeremiah...hell, in the end."
Summary: 5 Stars
While watching Jeremiah Johnson (1972), I wondered as to what, within my own self, would drive me to choose such as life as Robert Redford's character did in the film, that of a mountain man. Living in near complete isolation, subsisting almost entirely off the land, enjoying the best while often surviving (sometimes not) the worst nature has to offer...the idea of escaping civilization, throwing off the shackles of conventionalism, and communing with nature can be an appealing I suppose, but it would never work for me if for but one reason...I surely do enjoy my indoor plumbing...and toilet paper...adapted from two sources (a novel called "Mountain Man" by Vardis Fisher and a story titled "Crow Killer" by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker) by John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian) and Edward Anhalt (Panic in the Streets), the film was directed by Academy Award winning producer/actor/director Sydney Pollack (Tootsie, Out of Africa), and is the second of six films he worked on in some manner with Academy Award winner Robert Redford (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting), who also stars as the title character. Also appearing is Will Geer (Winchester '73, The President's Analyst), who's probably familiar to most as 'Grandpa' Zebulon Walton from the TV series "The Waltons", Stefan Gierasch (High Plains Drifter, Cornbread, Earl and Me), Josh Albee (Oliver Twist), Allyn Ann McLerie (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?), Joaquín Martínez (Joe Kidd), and Delle Bolton, in her one and only silver screen appearance.
Set in the mid 1800s, the story begins as we meet, through narration, a character named Jeremiah Johnson (Redford), "a man of proper wit and adventurous spirit suited to the mountains". His manner of dress indicates he was once in the army, but apparently no longer as he arrives in a frontier town, looking to outfit himself and head off into the Rocky Mountains, leaving behind all the trapping of civilized man, to which he does. Extremely hard times follow, but Johnson finds a friend (and perhaps kindred spirit) in a fellow mountain man named Bear Claw Chris Lapp (Geer), who takes him in and teaches Johnson enough to get by...the two eventually split up (a mountain man is a solitary creature), and Johnson eventually finds himself saddled with a mute boy (one of two settlers who survived an attack by some unfriendly Native Americans), and a Native American wife named Swan (Bolton), given to him as an honor by a local tribe (they thought he a great warrior for killing some of their enemies, those in a neighboring tribe). This family phase doesn't last too long as Johnson is enlisted by some gooberment types to help them locate a lost settler party, the only way to reach them by trespassing across sacred Native American lands, and thusly gains some powerful enemies who hound him on a continual basis... "some say he's dead...some say he never will be..."
Apparently the character of Jeremiah Johnson was actually based on a real person named John Johnston aka Crow Killer aka Liver Eater Johnston (his nicknames came about due to a long standing feud with a tribe known as the Crow, and his penchant for cutting their livers out and eating them...lovely). I'm not familiar with the individual, but I really enjoyed the movie, despite a sense of romanticism infused within the story here...I can't help but feel the actual man Redford's character was based on to be much different, much more `mountainy', less `Robert Redford', but regardless (Redford actually did a lot of his own stunt work, but being the hell of a guy he is, not wanting to put anyone out of work, insisted the production still paid his stunt double what he would have gotten if Redford hadn't done the dangerous stunts himself)...two things that stuck out in my mind after watching this film...one, the exquisitely beautiful backdrop of the Utah landscape throughout (some of the film was shot on Redford's expansive Utah estate...must be nice), and two, how little actual dialog there was in this nearly two hour film. Pollack and Redford present here an engaging story, full of interesting characters, framed against gorgeous backgrounds. The story, to me, was essentially broken down into three parts, the first being Johnson's indoctrination into being a mountain man (stripping away much of his `civilized' accoutrements), the second his family phase, and then thirdly going it alone again...by the end of the film I found myself asking if his trials and hardships were worth it, but then realized those weren't actually applicable questions because Redford's character didn't have a choice. Yes, he chose to leave behind his life among men and cities, but it was a decision based on an intense desire from within to live life on his own terms and survive the dangerous of the wilderness based on his own abilities. Even now I wouldn't understand his specific choice to live amongst the trees, critters and such, but I do understand the idea of actually living a life worth living, the rewards enjoyed from going your own way, doing what feels natural and right within yourself...many people never find this desire, and thus never experience the harmonious totality of completely freeing ones spirit. Does that make sense? Perhaps not, but it came through in the story for me...my favorite sequence in the film was near the beginning as Johnson became friends with the older trapper called Bear Claw, played by Geer...the two men were out hunting and Bear Claw was showing him how to use a horse as cover (hide behind it) when hunting elk. Johnson asks "Won't he see my feet?" to which Bear Claw replies "Elk don't know how many feet a horse has!" It was much funnier in the film, only because the delivery of the lines is as important as the lines themselves.
Warner Brothers provides the fullscreen (Pan & Scan) and widescreen (2.35:1), enhanced for 16X9 TVs, picture formats on this DVD, both of which look excellent, and the Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround audio comes through very clear and strong. There are some special features including cast and crew bios/filmographies, video liner notes for the film, a theatrical trailer, a featurette titled `The Saga of Jeremiah Johnson", and some Reel Reccomendations, which are pretty silly, as they're supposed to be recommendations made towards one liking this film, but are really just Warner Brothers touting whatever DVD releases they had at the time...I mean really, how in the world do they link this film with Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995)? I did, as others, thought it was unnecessary that studio include the intermission segment on this DVD release, but if they hadn't, someone would have complained about its exclusion, especially if it was present in the original theatrical release...I guess, if anything, it offered me the chance to get up and take a leak without actually having to push the pause button on the DVD player remote...
Cookieman108
By the way, if'n some old mountain man ever asks you if you know how to skin griz while following him into his cabin, just say no, you surely don't...
Movie Review: starkly beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
There is a poetry to this movie that has stayed with me - from the first time I ever saw it, when it first came out. From the haunting strains of Indian flutes as we first see the ferry bringing Jeremiah to the first stop in his new life - a trading post outfitting those intrepid or crazy enough to disappear into the wild - to the end, when he has weathered more than anyone today probably could survive, we are absorbed into a world that will never be possible again. Trappers routinely sleep in deep snow without tents and without freezing to death; a mountain man, mauled by a bear and incapacitated, calmly writes out his last will and testament, leaving his rifle to "whutever finds it - Lord hope it be a White man", and freezes to a tree; another mountain man shaves his head to prevent himself being scalped.
This film deserves classic status. Even the language used herein is measured and syntaxed to approximate the way the English language was spoken in the 1830s, and its exact and proper nature is almost a dialect of its own. I nearly likened it to Elizabethan, but that's obviously wrong; it's just that the flavour of the speech is like watching a play in some respects.
There isn't, actually, a LOT of dialog; enough for the drama to be established, and certainly enough when required; but the story is the man, who is alone more often than not. Jeremiah Johnson, a youngish man at the start of the story, suffers some never-explained falling-out with civilization and literally heads to the hills, with no wilderness skills but plenty of nerve. He is having a rough go of it - his ineptitude earns him a bye from a Crow warrior, who observes his pathetic attempts at fishing and either is too amused or too disgusted (or both) to deal harshly with the intruder into his territory - until he is rescued shortly before starving to death by a crusty old mountain man out looking for "griz". The older man takes Jeremiah into his cabin and instructs him on all aspects of being a mountain man, and having learned well, Jeremiah goes out on his own.
This movie is based on real people; the trader Jeremiah sees at the beginning, Roubideau, actually had a post - I've been to the spot of at least one of his stores, and it's remote now; I can't imagine how vulnerable people felt then, when there was real danger of disaster at such places. Jeremiah Johnson was created on a man called "Liver-Eating" Johnson, a real person who took it out on the Crow Nation for killing his wife by - you guessed it - supposedly killing Crow warriors and eating their livers. In this movie, the battle is joined one warrior at a time.
"Lucky they're Crow," Del Gue, another mountain man, says after a nighttime encounter. "Apache's 'd send 50 at once".
My theatre teacher in college used Robert Redford as an example of an actor who uses facial expression in lieu of verbal extrapolation in acting, and it is especially apparent here, with so little dialog in the first place. He is aided in this by the fact that two of his closest companions are a mute boy and a woman who speaks no English; he learns by osmosis to communicate nonverbally, to a large extent. The few others he encounters in his wanderings are the larger-than-life mountain men, a crazy woman - mother of the mute boy, she and he are the only survivors of an Indian attack on the family; she ultimately forces Jeremiah to take the boy with him when he happens upon their cabin - and a troop of cavalrymen who prove to be his undoing.
The movie in the first part is fairly straightforward; Jeremiah becomes a mountain man, establishes alliances with other mountain men and with some Indian tribes (including, at first, the same Crow warrior who saw his attempts at fishing early on) and even marries into the Flathead tribe, and builds a cabin on the Musselshell River, in the interests of living there in harmony with the native population. Along comes the cavalry, strongarming him into guiding them to a stranded wagon train. This angers the Crow Nation,who resent the intrusion of white militia in their territory, and the last half of the movie deals with Jeremiah's one-man war with them after they kill his wife and the mute boy in his absence.
A lot of this movie is the scenery, which was at least partially filmed on Redford's ranch (one way to keep expenses down). There is one scene of him chopping down a tree - I do not think I have ever seen a sky so blue. You can nearly smell the pine needles as you watch; feel the cold; taste the sweetness of the wild water. During one of the one-on-one battles with a warrior, the sound of an elk trumpeting in the distance brings an eerie accent to the scene.
I come back to this movie again and again. It is a beautiful homage to an indomitable spirit, done in a drop-dead gorgeous natural setting. Unforgettable.
Movie Review: A PG narrative of "Liver-Eatin' Johnson"
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is one of several fascinating historical threads that I have been following since I first saw it as a 12-year old and loved it. First, it is based on the actual life of a mountain man named John Johnston, later changed to Johnson, and known in the West from the mid-1840s as Liver-Eating Johnson (see the book "Crow Killer" published 1958, R.W. Thorp & R. Bunker). I did not know this until recently and assumed it was all fiction. He was a huge man for his time, 6'2" and 240 pounds in his early 20's, had fists the size of baked hams and was best in hand-to-hand fighting with his 16" Bowie knife. Thorp and Bunker based the book on first-person interviews with several mountain men and others who had known of him, including, surprisingly, the famous photographer of the 1870's West, W.H. Jackson (photographer for the Hayden Expedition and famous for the first photograph of Mount of the Holy Cross near Vail, Colorado), but the real detail being furnished by an old mountain man named White-Eye Anderson, who told the story to R.W.T. in 1941 when he was in his 90's. After Johnson's Flathead wife was murdered on the Musselshell in Montana by a band of young Crow braves, Johnson "took the trail" on the entire Crow nation. His calling card, for over 20 years of butchery on the Crows, was to remove the liver of every Crow he killed and eat it. The Crows called him "Dapiek Absaroka". Vardis Fischer, on whose book this movie is based, "borrowed" as well certain scenes from a book written in the 1840's called "Life in the Far West" by George Ruxton, a first-person account of life in and near the Colorado Rockies. This movie does a fine job with a subset of Johnston's life, leaving out his service in the Civil War, and his later life as a town marshal and finally, his death in an old veterans home in Los Angeles. I got the notion that Fischer's book bordered on plagiarism after reading Ruxton, and after reading Crow Killer it seems all Fischer did was change Johnson's name to Jeremiah and slap on a cover with his name on it. The movie also leaves out that Johnson spies, among the pile of bones that was his wife outside the cabin, a round object about the size of an orange - the skull of his unborn baby. He collects the bones of wife and baby and puts them in an iron pot and inters them behind carefully mortised rocks near the cabin; a shrine, his "kittle 'o bones" those closest to him called it (never in his presence) he visits over the years. Will Geer's character, near as I kin figger, is based on a friend of Johnson's named "Bear Claw" Chris Lapp, a man known to say, when presented with grizzly claws his mountain man friends collected for him to make necklaces of, "Great Jehosophat! Pocahontas and John Smith!" The Crazy Woman, one of the most sympathetic characters I have ever seen in a movie, was in real life the wife of John Morgan, a foolish homesteader on the Oregon Trail who quarreled with the wagon master and took off on his own only to be tomahawked and scalped alive by Crows, his daughter raped and scalped alive, and his two young sons killed. Mrs Morgan, having killed several of the Indians with an axe yet driven insane by the loss, lived on the Musselshell and was cared for by Johnson and his fellow mountain men for years. The movie leaves out the little detail that she and Johnson beheaded the Crow corpses and set them on stakes at each corner of the graveyard where she buried her children, the weathered skulls a powerful medicine for the Crows ever after. It was the Crow's deference to this insane white woman living in their midst that finally convinced Johnson to call off his vendetta against them, after having killed nearly 400 Crow warriors. Liver-Eating Johnson's grave (and here I borrow heavily from "Crow Killer") is in a cemetary off of Sepulveda Boulevard (interesting, that. One of Johnson's comrades was a huge black-bearded Hispanic named "Big Anton Sepulveda") in a section called San Juan Hill, row D, 2nd stone from the road reads "Jno. Johnston, Co. H, 2nd Colo. Cav.". Get the movie and enjoy it; it's a true story. Only took me 30 years to find that out.Movie Review: The marrow of the world
Summary: 5 Stars
Sometime in the mid-1800s, presumably after the onset of the US war with Mexico (1846-48) but prior to its conclusion (How goes the war with Mexico? It is over. Who won?) a young man, Jeremiah Johnson, shakes off the dust of civilization to begin a new life in the wild mountains of western America.
Sydney Pollack's 1972 JEREMIAH JOHNSON is grand entertainment, a sprawling story of man-in-nature filmed in some of the most beautiful country in America. Jeremiah Johnson (Robert Redford) begins the adventure as a callow youth who can't fish or keep a fire going to save his life. He clatters through the wilderness and lets his smell precede him. At the rate he's going he won't be going much farther.
Enter Bear Claw, a white wizened old mountain man who's wise in the ways of the wild and a great friend and hunter of grizz'. Boisterously played by Will Geer, Bear Claw acts as mentor to young Johnson. Bear Claw is the first of many colorful characters peppered throughout JEREMIAH JOHNSON. Later Johnson will happen upon a woman whose family was massacred. The indians will not bother you on account of because you are touched, Johnson assures her. Bear Claw must have taught him a LOT in that ten-minute scene of their'n. Yet later we meet Del Gue (Stefan Gierasch), head shaved, buried up to his neck in sand, asking for a hat and desperately trying to blow an irritating feather out of his nose. Like Bear Claw before him, Del Gue is a picturesque and somewhat eccentric mentor.
JEREMIAH JOHNSON needs all the colorful mountain men and Blackfeet and Shoshone and Flatheads it can get because Redford's character is as flat as hardtack and as colorful as a toad's belly. Custom built for its star, the movie revolves around an introverted and introspective lead, something that works most of the time, although it's probably good they didn't give personality tests to prospective mountain men back then. Redford doesn't fit the type. This film would be a tough, long and dry read indeed without its wild men (and women) of the wild.
The short, contemporary featurette on the dvd tells us that JEREMIAH JOHNSON is a saga about a young man in the wilderness, "completely unaided, wholly responsible for himself." You could argue with that appealing tagline whose chief merit is that if fits on a billboard and plays to the Redford Mystique. In any event, any movie whose main character hunts and fishes and messes around in the outdoors every day has a tremendous built in edge with a certain percentage of the moving watching public. Better yet it has an obedient son (adopted from the touched woman) and a beautiful young indian bride. Best, neither speaks a word of English! The boy can't - sorry, cannot (we do not contract words in this movie), the boy cannot sass because he is mute, the woman cannot argue because you do not speak her language, and she do not speak your'n.
For the most part, then, JEREMIAH JOHNSON is bully entertainment. The location shots range from beautiful to breathtaking. The action scenes are well composed and exciting, for the most part, anyway. The wolves attack scene doesn't work - it relies too heavily on close-ups of snarling wolves clamping down on heavily padded arms and medium shots of a life sized ragdoll wolf or two being bounced against horse withers and fetlocks. Heartily recommended for anyone who enjoys a rousing adventure played against a glorious background.
Movie Review: An American Masterwork!
Summary: 5 Stars
If one can point to a single film that served to establish Robert Redford's credentials as a bankable movie star and a man willing to explore interesting and provocative stories and issues, it was this absorbing fact-based tale of a former U. S Army veteran turned reclusive mountain man named Jeremiah Johnson. The movie caused such a stir in the American west that when I lived there briefly in the mid 1970s, shortly after its theater release, there were many, many urban refugees making a stab at following Johnson's legendary example of a return to wild nature theme along Utah's Wasatch front. One would find mild mannered, longhaired, and heavily bearded young men with their well scrubbed blond haired women padding through the local Ogden, Utah supermarkets in their simple threadbare clothing, looking for basic provisions of Cheerios, Cheetos and California wine, climbing back into their muddy Jeep Renegades, and disappearing back into the wild places. The movie itself is a joy to experience, a travelogue of the Rocky Mountain West, with breath-taking vistas and wide-angled panoramas of the rugged mountain terrain providing a magnificent backdrop to the unfolding tale. Johnson (Redford) is fleeing what he regards the senseless futility of modern (circa 1850) civilization, preferring to live a life of true rugged individualism, and endeavoring to survive long enough to become a mountain man. In the midst of his feeble first attempts to do so, he encounters a wise old goat played beautifully by the late Will Geer, and through Geer's tutelage Johnson gradually evolves into a skilled and self-reliant practitioner of the art of bare-knuckled survival. And we come to care about his man who wants nothing so much as a more meaningful and more centered existence.
Of course, there is trouble along the path to such a life, and the fractious interplay between arrogant soldiers and unpredictable Indians living in the mountains provide the coda to which his actions and eventual legend begins to unfold. Johnson gradually finds company both by way of a lovely and loving Indian woman, and an orphan he takes in after rampaging Indians murder the boy's family. One of the most interesting of the themes of the movie was the way in which the reasons, issues and concerns of Native Americans are portrayed, so that one sees them more as the complex, intelligent, and complex people they were rather than as the cardboard villains Hollywood has characteristically painted them as being.
In essence, this was an attempt by Redford to give a thought-provoking and thoughtful message about the nature of our culture and the importance of respect for different ways of living as well as different forms of culture, with his conclusion leaving us asking some important questions about prevailing cultural presumptions and the way we view ourselves and others. I ask the viewer to watch the final frames carefully, as Johnson provides a friendly greeting to an Indian brave, providing the signal the long war between them is over, as they pass dangerously close to each other. Some less diligent viewers suggested, to Redford's intense later frustration, that he was giving the brave the finger! Redford shook his head in disbelief, wondering aloud how anyone could possibly come away with such a notion from what he had presented so well cinematically. All in all, a great film, and one I heartily recommend for your collection. Enjoy!