This movie is one of several consuming historical threads that I have been following since I first saw it as a 12-year worn and loved it. First, it is based on the precise 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 (peer 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 vast 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 famed photographer of the 1870′s West, W.H. Jackson (photographer for the Hayden Expedition and well-known for the first photograph of Mount of the Holy Evil reach Vail, Colorado), but the staunch detail being furnished by an feeble mountain man named White-Eye Anderson, who told the chronicle 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 stir” on the entire Crow nation. His calling card, for over 20 years of butchery on the Crows, was to assume 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 clear scenes from a book written in the 1840′s called “Life in the Far West” by George Ruxton, a first-person memoir of life in and advance the Colorado Rockies. This movie does a graceful 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 venerable veterans home in Los Angeles. I got the opinion 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 mask 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 unhurried carefully mortised rocks reach 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, approach as I kin figger, is based on a friend of Johnson’s named “Gain Claw” Chris Lapp, a man known to say, when presented with grizzly claws his mountain man friends serene for him to invent necklaces of, “Tall Jehosophat! Pocahontas and John Smith!” The Crazy Woman, one of the most sympathetic characters I have ever seen in a movie, was in precise life the wife of John Morgan, a foolish homesteader on the Oregon Promenade who quarreled with the wagon master and took off on his enjoy 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 cramped detail that she and Johnson beheaded the Crow corpses and state them on stakes at each corner of the graveyard where she buried her children, the weathered skulls a much 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 (gripping, that. One of Johnson’s comrades was a big black-bearded Hispanic named “Spacious Anton Sepulveda”) in a part called San Juan Hill, row D, 2nd stone from the road reads “Jno. Johnston, Co. H, 2nd Colo. Cav.”. Win the movie and luxuriate in it; it’s a just sage. Only took me 30 years to fetch that out.

He was a stout man, maybe even growing in physical stature with the growth of his myth; deadly with his Bowie knife and his gun alike. Formerly a fighter in the U.S.-Mexican war, he had left the lowland’s ways gradual in favor of a mountain man’s: the lonesome hunt, the wild outdoors, and the confrontation with nature rather than his fellow men. And he came to be known as “Crow Killer” and “Liver Eating Johns(t) on” when he took war to the Crow nation after they killed his wife.

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Based on Raymond Thorp/Robert Bunker’s “Crow Killer” and Vardis Fisher’s “Mountain Man” and scripted by John Milius and Edward Anhalt – with input from frequent Redford/Pollack cooperator David Rayfiel – Sydney Pollack’s and Robert Redford’s 1972 movie loosely traces the mythical hunter’s account, opening with his arrival at the fort where he buys his first horse and gun. “Stagger due west as the sun sets. Turn left at the Rocky Mountains,” is a trader’s goodnatured retort to Johnson’s naive inquiry where to gain “absorb, beaver and other critters worth cash money when skinned.” But soon he finds that his lowland skills no longer do him any reliable, almost starving in the freezing colossal winter before being taken in by ancient “griz” hunter Own Claw Chris Lapp (Will Geer in a stand-out role – his and Redford’s deadpan exchanges alone develop this movie worth its label) .

Setting out on his contain again the following year Johnson fares better, even gaining the respect of a Crow warrior prosaically named Paints His Shirt Red (Joaquin Martinez), the first person he encountered in the mountains. After assisting a settler’s wife who had to survey her family massacred by Indians (Allyn Ann McLerie) and reluctantly agreeing to pick charge of her son (Josh Albee) – a boy grown quiet by the horrors he witnessed, whom he names Caleb – he comes across white hunter Del Gue (Stefan Gierasch), buried up to his head in sand by a band of Blackfeet. Revenging that act unwittingly leaves Johnson with a wife, in exchange for bestowing the Blackfeet’s ponies and guns on Flathead chief Two-Tongues-Lebeaux (Richard Angarola) : the chief’s daughter Swan (Delle Bolton) . Although neither embraces the match enthusiastically, over time Jeremiah and Swan learn to like and, eventually, cherish each other. But then fate strikes: Against better judgment pressured into guiding a cavalry company through Crow burial ground, Johnson finds Swan and Caleb murdered upon his return. He sets out after the Crow who invaded his home … and plants the seeds of his fable.

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“Jeremiah Johnson” was Redford’s and Pollack’s second of seven collaborations after 1966′s “This Property is Condemned.” What most obviously characterizes this movie is the breathtaking manner in which its cinematography uses Utah’s mountains (doubling for the story’s sincere Montana setting) : despite studio budgetary limits shot entirely on site, the film had Redford acting as a virtual tour guide to the exquisite Wasatch, which he had recently made his home himself.

But the movie also shows huge restraint, particularly given its violent underlying anecdote. There’s no blood-gushing “Braveheart”-style, no dramatic score; fights are mostly one-on-one, occurring as they would in genuine life – silently, with only the opponents’ grunts being heard – and despite his fearsome epithet we never actually eye Johnson eat a tedious Crow warrior’s liver. (Reportedly a script change on which Redford insisted: wisely so.) Similarly, Johnson’s and Swan’s relationship builds on miniature symbolic gestures, engaging from his extreme attempts to stammer her English and refusal to learn her language to conversations in Salish (Flathead) ; and from her submissive expectation of his exercising his marital rights on their wedding night (which rather repulses him) to later-exchanged tender glances and smiles: Thus, we only learn about their marriage’s belated consummation when one morning Swan points to his beard in response to his quiz about her reddish cheeks. – Further, there’s no dramatic conclusion; no final battle: as Johnson’s chronicle begins to grow and he withdraws deeper and deeper into the mountains, he retraces his steps and meets in reverse order the people he encountered after his arrival: Del Gue, the settler now living in Caleb’s mother’s cabin, Fill Claw Chris Lapp; and finally Paints His Shirt Red who, although a Crow, created a monument in Johnson’s honor and sends him off with a last salute, which Johnson reciprocates; ending the movie in an immortalizing freeze-frame shot – again, a feature insisted on by Redford, doubtlessly reminiscent of “Butch and Sundance” (and repeated one contrivance or another in several subsequent movies) .

Despite its languid move and although impartial under two hours long, “Jeremiah Johnson” formally takes an legend come, complete with overture, entr’acte and narrator (uncredited, but I’m told Redford’s “Brubaker”-costar Tim McIntire), whose subtle voiceovers and brief songs provide key record bridges. While the latter match the movie’s overall style and the overture at least corresponds with Johnson’s mythical stature – albeit also setting up ultimately unfulfilled expectations of a dramatic finale – adding an entr’acte may have been a bit remarkable, particularly in the middle of the accelerate through the Crow burial ground (incidentally a screenplay addition designed to give the Indians a reason to punish Johnson and not originate them appear as mindless killers) . In my conception this breaks the dramatic tension rather than enhancing it; problematic insofar as virtually all that remains thereafter is Johnson’s late withdrawal into the mountains and fights with the Crow. But no matter. This is a terrific movie, featuring substantial banter with Johnson’s fellow hunters as well as some wonderfully glowing scenes with Swan, showcasing some of North America’s most dramatically glorious scenery, and growing on you more and more the more often you examine it.

And some say he’s up there quiet …

“The device that you streak is the scheme that you decide. The day that you tarry is the day that you lose. Sunshine or impart, a man will always wonder where the dazzling wind blows …”

(Lyrics, Jeremiah Johnson’s theme.)

Also recommended:

Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson (Midland Book)

Mountain Man: A Current of Male and Female in the Early American West

The Redrock Chronicles: Saving Wild Utah (Center Books on Site, Space, and Time)

Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here

Audubon: Grizzly & Man

A River Runs Through It (Deluxe Edition)

These Rare Lands
FHI Flat Iron