Jeremiah Johnson

This is a great movie! Redford is fantastic

The story is real and the scenery is beautiful. There is action, drama and the struggle between life and death.

Best movie ever made!!

Good flick; not GWTW but good.

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.

A greatly sanitized depiction of a legendary mountain man, Jeremiah Johnson is a reverently-made film so steeped in myth that it will probably be cherished by generations of escapist movie-lovers, both young and old, long after Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack themselves pass into the mists of Hollywood legend. From the very first scene as ex-soldier Johnson steps off the raft, one immediately senses the back-to-nature vibe so prevalent in the midst of Nixonian America--and it never lets up. Here is a man who eschews American civilization for a one-way trip to where only eagles, grizzlies, and their kin can call home--not to mention the Crow, Flatheads, and Blackfeet. No explanation is given because none was needed. Jeremiah Johnson embodied the psyche and yearning of nearly every war-weary American at that time. Every shot in the film is lovingly and painstakingly imbued with the spirit of the Rockies, even in those scenes presaging imminent battles with nature and natives. The natural backdrop and sublimely understated musical scoring invite and allow the objective viewer to become intimate with Johnson along with his travails, encounters, and fates. I can't recall another Hollywood film of this ilk that so casts its protagonist with such a contrived stoic acquiescence to his dangerous and isolated existence. When the constantly set-upon Johnson is beseeched by a concerned fellow mountain man to head back down to a town, Johnson replies: "I've seen a town." So have we, and we'd rather be along with Johnson. Compare and contrast this with the slightly antedated Richard Harris vehicles A Man Called Horse and Man in the Wilderness. There are parts in this film, however, where Johnson's impassiveness is powerfully interrupted, including one of the most affecting and cinematically effective primal screams in the history of moviedom. Jeremiah Johnson is in my collection because I'm compelled to revisit it often. There's really nothing "not" to like about it; its story, characters, direction, and awesomely beautiful setting make for a timeless viewing experience. If anything can be said to be a slight weakness it would have to be Redford's often laboringly stilted speech acting. Methinks, however, that complaint would be like badgering the kid who owns the football. ;-) In response to the previous reviewer who complained about the image quality, I can say unequivocally that the image and sound quality of this DVD is infinitely better than that of my old VHS fullscreen version. No complaints here on that score whatsoever. (By the way, this is a dual-sided disc with both widescreen and fullscreen versions.) However, I also agree with another reviewer that the presence of an intermission and entr'acte is entirely superfluous; this film is only about two hours in length--and it's one of the most entertaining two-hour western adventures available for all ages.

Great movie. DVD's are about dead these days with streaming. Get them in hand wile you still can .

Great

Arrived On Time. Great movie.

Parfait 👌

davvero un film appassionante e profondo, dove si vive lo spirito della frontiera selvaggia del West americano, senza nessuna pretesa di voler trarre una morale e senza alcun giudizio. Fantastica la prova di Redford. Imperdibile per chi ama il genere.

Después de la guerra, un soldado hastiado de la civilización busca adentrarse a las inospitas montañas, con buenas actuaciones de Robert Redford y compañía te dejarán una buena impresión imagen excelente subtitulos en español la recomiendo.

Watched it last night and loved it