I remember that meme that was going around about the bearded guy in the wilderness, the one that many people (myself included) thought looked vaguely like Will Ferrell. It wasn’t, of course. It was Robert Redford in the movie Jeremiah Johnson. I didn’t really know much about the movie, but it popped up on HBO Max so I added it to my watchlist just out of idle curiosity. I figured I’d get to it eventually, even if it seemed to be leaving the service a month later.
Then I learned what the basis for the movie was and thought, “OK, I really need to see this.”
Mexican-American War veteran Jeremiah Johnson (Robert Redford) heads out west to become a mountain man, living off the land by selling skins and the like. However, despite whatever skills he brought with him, he flounders around quite a bit, unable to find much in the way of wildlife or even to hit something when he does with his rifle. His luck starts to change first when he finds a better rifle held by a frozen corpse (the attached will bequeathed the rifle to whoever found it) and then when he finds a mentor in the form of Bear Claw Chris Lapp (Will Geer), a hermit who knows the ways of the mountain. Lapp knows the land and how to live off of it, and he knows the local natives, even speaking the language of some of them, and which ones can be dealt with and which ones can’t. After his training, Johnson heads off and soon finds himself with a family of sorts in the form of a traumatized mute boy (Josh Albee) and a Native American wife (Delle Bolton) that he was gifted with by her chieftain father. But then he’s asked to guide some soldiers to rescue a wagon train, and while Johnson is reluctant to do so, he does, particularly when the commanders insist on going through a Crow burial site, a place Johnson knows is a bad place to go, but they go anyway. Johnson then returns to his home to find his family slaughtered, setting him a course for revenge against any Crow he can find.
By the by, the whole “Johnson goes out seeking revenge” doesn’t happen until well after the halfway point in the movie. This is a rather leisurely-set movie. It’s under two hours, but it somehow has an overture and an intermission, something I usually only see in movies that run closer to three hours. Most of the first half is about Jeremiah Johnson learning to live off the land, building his family, and essentially becoming something like a part of the wilderness. He clearly doesn’t belong when he first arrives, and the Cavalry soldiers he escorts later also seem like they came from somewhere else. I would give credit to that in large part to John Milius, co-writer of the script, who has some rather, shall we say, interesting ideas on manhood and masculinity. Johnson, encountering a woman gone mad with grief over the slaughter of most of her family, sees it for what it is and tells her they have graves to dig, and later cannot bring himself to leave the woman on her own (she gives him the above-mentioned boy, the only other survivor). He is inadvertently involved in a violent horse theft from one tribe of Natives and gives the claimed ponies to another (leading to his gift of a wife). He’s not much interested in violence, but when he has to, he is brutal and efficient against whoever has drawn his wrath.
If anything, the more gentle tone director Sydney Pollack went for in the first half or so somewhat undermines the second half. Redford’s line delivery sounded a little stiff to me for much of the movie, perhaps because he didn’t belong in the setting and has to find a way to fit first. Much of Johnson’s rampage against the Crow is shown in a montage as he rides around, killing Crow men, and still maintaining a calm demeanor. It’s an interesting choice, and one I am not sure entirely works.
There’s perhaps a good reason for that: this movie is based on the story of John “Liver-Eating” Johnson, a man reputed to have eaten the livers of the Crows he killed. Some stories suggest he killed, scalped, and ate the livers of somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 Crows. Something tells me that at no point was there going to be a movie where Robert Redford eats another man’s liver. Instead, we get a movie that is more about living in nature, and the rampage is perhaps given such a small portion of the movie because that isn’t that. The movie essentially begins and ends with Johnson encountering the same Crow chief as the two both times size each other up and make a decision on what they each are at the time. Does the movie itself work? For the most part, yes. But anyone looking for some kind of action-packed Western of one man against an entire Native American tribe will probably be disappointed.
Grade: B
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