MOVIE REVIEW: Jeremiah Johnson
A look at a 19th century fugitive from civilization through a 1970’s lens.
By Alan Herrmann
MOVIE CRITIC
During the early 1970s, Western films were experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Although they had never gone completely out of fashion – these films had been around since the dawn of cinema – there was a conscious effort on Hollywood’s part to produce a new style of Western.
Filmmakers were looking for a more naturalistic and violent, grittier, and realistic paradigm to explore. Sam Peckinpah had pushed the envelope with his ultra-violent Western, The Wild Bunch, in 1969 and other films would follow suit.
Some of these films also reflected the chaos the country was going through at the time. The violence of the Vietnam War televised on the evening news, and civil rights and student protests encountering brutal resistance from law enforcement created a fertile ground for filmmakers.
Movies like Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man showed parallels between the Washita Massacre of 1868 and the My Lai Massacre nearly one hundred years later. Both George A. Custer’s campaign against the Cheyene and William Calley’s against the Vietnamese would include the slaughter of women and children.
When director Sydney Pollack and leading actor Robert Redford decided to make their frontier film, it certainly contained a good deal of grit and violence, but their tale was more about withdrawing from civilization and its uncivilized horrors to a more back-to-nature existence. It was an existence sought by many Americans who were leaving the cities and towns behind for the peace of the wilderness. It is a romanticized notion that the filmmakers turn on its head.
In the 1840s, a young ex-soldier named Jeremiah Johnson (Redford), who is disillusioned with civilization, journeys into the wilds of the Rockies to become a mountain man. He encounters fierce grizzly bears and wolves, hospitable and inhospitable Native Americans – Pollack does not purposefully villainize or idolize Native Americans but shows them in a realistic light as complex human beings. Other mountain men and unseasoned settlers will cross paths with Johnson as well.
Filmed against the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains in Utah, there is a sweeping vastness that Jeremiah and we, the audience, find breathtaking, but there is also a strong sense of isolation. Initially, isolation is exactly what Johnson wants, but he finds frustration in trying to survive in the wild. He is a greenhorn when it comes to trapping, hunting, and fishing – the survival skills of a mountain man – until he is saved and mentored by an old, experienced white trapper named Bear Claw (Will Geer), who aptly refers to Johnson as “pilgrim.”
Johnson applies the skills he learns from Bear Claw and heads back out on his own to trade pelts with friendly tribes like the Flathead, but is wary of the more war-like Crows. Along the way he adopts a mute boy, Caleb, who has survived a raiding party that killed his family, and he weds Swan, the daughter of a Flathead chief who speaks no English.
The film has sparse dialogue, which makes sense with a character who spends so much time alone. Even his newly adopted family communicates with few words, a measure of quiet and solitude in direct contrast to the chaotic life he left behind.
As he builds a cabin for his newfound family and settles down, we see Johnson in a new light. At first, he is impatient and abrupt with his family, seeing them as a burden and an unwanted responsibility. But over time he learns to love his patchwork family and settles into the best of both worlds: he is still isolated from the world below, but he is no longer lonely up in the mountains.
Sadly, his contentment is fleeting. Civilization encroaches on his perfect world when a troop of cavalry and a reverend show up at his door seeking his assistance to guide them to a stranded party of pioneers.
He reluctantly agrees, and after taking the troops across a Crow burial ground he becomes spooked, knowing his trespassing might incur the wrath of the Crow. Regrettably, his instincts are correct, and when he returns to his cabin, he finds Swan and Caleb dead, victims of a Crow raiding party.
Johnson, once again a loner, seeks out and kills his family’s assassins. This creates an endless cycle of violence with the Crows sending out one warrior at a time to kill Johnson, but he survives. Over time, he retreats farther into the mountains as he sees more settlers claiming territory in their own pursuit of freedom.
Ultimately, Johnson becomes a legend, not just to the Crows who hunt him, but also to the settlers who hold him in awe for his deeds. He is a man who is both feared and respected. Initially the ending was intended to be violent and conclusive, but Pollack opted for something more ambiguous, a state many Americans could relate to in the 1970s. Johnson has rediscovered his isolation, and the tagline for the film suits his legacy perfectly: “Some say he’s dead…some say he never will be.”
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