So it is fitting that I get to another snow based film as we head into December. It's about that time of year where a film like this can hit harder as you can't easily walk out into warm sunshine and try to remember that you have things a lot better than Jeremiah Johnson did.
Jeremiah Johnson could also be hitting me harder than some other films would normally due to the recent scarring that The Great Silence did that left me raw. The harsh winds of the Rocky Mountains blow cold... and they blow sharp. And this film cut deep into me in a few places.
Film #25 Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
Here is the imdb.com cast listing. Here is the wikipedia page about the production.
This film is a story of a man in three parts. We first meet Jeremiah Johnson (Robert Redford) as he is getting off a boat and is about to start a new life being a hunter and trapper in the mountains. It is implied that he is an army veteran from the Mexican-American War but he doesn't really ever comment much about it. Honestly, you never really learn Jeremiah's history and that's perfectly fine. This isn't about that man, it's about the man he will become once he climbs the mountain.
Early on, he has very little success catching fish or even keeping a fire lit. When he comes across the frozen body of trapper it is a bit of shock as it shows just how perilous his decision to become a mountain man is. The frozen trapper does leave a will stating that any man (hopefully a white man, as the letter puts it) that finds him can have his gun. Johnson, seeing it is the kind of gun that he was looking for, takes it and moves on.
Johnson draws the attention of an older trapper and hunter, 'Bear Claw' (Will Geer), who sees that Johnson is terribly inexperienced and takes him under his wing to teach him what he knows. He shows Jeremiah how to hunt elk (by walking behind their horses, 'Elk don't know how many legs a horse's got') how to bury warm embers from a campfire under your sleeping roll to keep you heated through the night, and how to build traps for other game.
Bear Claw also teaches Jeremiah about the local Indian tribes. How to identify what arrow belongs to which warrior and how to get along to get along. It is their land and the trappers tread carefully on it (or well they should).
Soon Jeremiah is out on his own and this starts the second part of his story.
He comes across a settler's cabin and sees a woman in front talking to herself. She is trying to put shoes on a dead body. Jeremiah sees that her family has been brutally killed by Indians and she has lost her mind with grief. He approaches her cautiously and tells her he is a friend. She threatens him with a gun and he just tells her, 'There's graves to be dug.' After helping her bury her husband and child, he discovers there is another living family member in the cabin; a young boy who does not speak due to the trauma he just witnessed. After fixing the door of the cabin and deciding he should be on his way, Jeremiah tries to convince the woman that her and her boy should go with him to town. She grabs her son and tells Jeremiah to take him. He does not want to do it at first, but the desperation in her facesconvinces him. So he and the boy leave.
While traveling with the boy, who Jeremiah names Caleb as he never speaks or says what his actual name is, come across a bald head in the sand. It belongs to a French Canadian trapper named Del Gue (Stefan Gierasch) who was put there to suffer by some Indians. Jeremiah and the boy free him and try to help him get his horses and furs back.
Del Gue screws up their quietly planned night raid on the Indians that took his things and ends up shooting them. Jeremiah is disgusted as he had no qualms with the Indians and didn't see the need to do that.
This leads to the three of them coming across a different tribe of Indians, the Flatheads, that see that they killed some of their enemies and welcomes them to their camp. Through a misunderstanding from Jeremiah, his offer of the enemies' scalps to the Flatheads' leader was taken as to be a large gift that must have a larger gift offered in kind, Jeremiah ends getting married to the leader's daughter, Swan (Delle Bolton).
So Jeremiah now has a son that is not his and a wife he didn't want. A family he must care for that he never intended to have in the first place. Over time, she learns a little English, he learns a lot of Flathead, and they build a cabin, their home. Life is nice. He starts to care for her, she for him, and the kid is smiling.
This is where the third part of the story takes place. Spoilers ahead.
The Army comes through and convinces Jeremiah to help them get to some men stranded in a valley that he knows the way too. He reluctantly does this as they try to make him feel guilty for leaving those men stranded. Along the route, he realizes they are about to enter an Indian burial site. He tells the army leaders that they will need to circle around (which would involve miles of backtracking). They don't really respect the ground for what it is, and when they ask Jeremiah if he believes in their magic, he replies that he doesn't believe in it but the Indians do. So they strike a compromise, head through the site, slowly, single file, no noise, and no disruption.
Jeremiah leads them to their stranded men and immediately heads back to his home and family. Crossing back through the burial ground, he gets a bad feeling and forces his horse to run as hard as it can. He arrives back to the cabin (and the life) he built, and finds his wife and adopted son murdered by Indians, supposedly as revenge for sullying the burial ground.
Distraught, he burns the cabin down with the two of them placed peacefully side by side on the bed, and then starts actively hunting and slaughtering every Indian he can find. Eventually, the Indians start sending individual warriors to ambush him at random times. This is because they believe they are only as strong as their strongest enemy and Jeremiah Johnson is the fiercest.
I did go over about 95% of the plot. I am going to leave the last 5% for anyone that wants to watch this. It was a bold (and ambiguous) decision to end the film the way they do and I don't know if I want to go into it and honestly don't think I could really do it justice.
Jeremiah Johnson is so much more about the journey than its ultimate destination. Jeremiah himself doesn't know what he is going to find in the mountains and wanders from point to point, dealing with each new situation as it develops. Its about sympathizing with him when he can't catch fish at the very start or being excited for him when he learns to hunt elk, or feeling the terror of hearing his horses panicking in the distance when a pack of wolves attack them while he is away trying to hunt buffalo. You see this harsh world through the eyes of a man that decided he wanted to be there but didn't understand what he would need to do to stay there. I believe at one in the film, Bear Claw tells him that the mountain always takes. It is a lesson that he learns over and over again, with each time it taking more. When Jeremiah is wearing a bear head as a cap at the end, you can see that there is more mountain than man at that point.
Robert Redford as Jeremiah is interesting. I have not see Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid so I can't speak to his previous work in a western, but I can say that I am glad that he had the role versus some of the other solidary silent strong male actors I have seen in other films on this list. Per the trivia, Clint Eastwood was originally attached to this but left the project, and as much as I am sure that he would have given a fine performance, I didn't need to see Western Clint Eastwood in this role. Yes, Jeremiah is tough, but he also is inexperienced. Redford has a vulnerability at the start that works so well that when the harsh events happen, you buy his transition.
This scene is from early in the film. Bear Claw finds Jeremiah because he ruined Bear Claw's grizzly hunt. See if you could imagine Eastwood playing somewhat naive like Redford does here. Also, there is a sweet tracking shot at the end that follows the action from the outside of the cabin.
I honestly wasn't sure what clip to post because the film does change its emotional tone with each passing season as it goes on. I didn't want to color the film as Jeremiah on the path of vengeance killing Indians, as while that is important to his story, that is not what defines this film.
Jeremiah appears to be a good man that is trying to forget about what he was before, but he still has his principals and inherent kindness when he first treks up the mountain. It is equal parts interesting and sad to see those things get stripped away from him. The moment he chooses to aid the army, he chose to acknowledge the man that he left behind, and by leaving his family he was leaving the man that he had become.
Redford doesn't have to say a word as he is traveling back through the burial site to know exactly what he is thinking and you hope against hope that he is wrong and that he can go back to Swan and Caleb. His agony tears you apart. He suddenly is not unlike that grieving widow he first encountered at the start of his journey, putting his family to bed the same way she was trying to put shoes on their dead feet. It is a devastating performance.
A word about the violence in this film. It is treated bluntly and brutally. There are no showdowns with tense music playing. When the violence does happen on screen (a lot is just the quiet aftermath that is disturbing in its own way) it is quick and efficient. This is not about style points but killing to stay alive, or out of pure rage. It reminded me a lot of The Wild Bunch and The Great Silence in how matter of fact the deaths were. It is uncomfortable because it feels real. It is hard to look at the stark red of splattered blood on the pure whiteness of the snow.
Sydney Pollack's direction is very defined and focused. Like the above the scene I linked, there are multiple times where there are sideways tracking shots that add a sense of momentum to what is going on in the story at that time. There was some beautiful crane shots as well. It doesn't have the flair the Leone brings to his films, but this isn't a film with flair. It is trying to show that life on the mountain can have many vast quiet and beautiful moments and sudden savageness. Knowing they shot on location in Utah in areas that were really hard to access by road makes me appreciate the effort that went into how this film was shot. You could easily watch this with the sound off and still get how it feels just from the shot selection and the camera movements.
Speaking of sound, the score/soundtrack for this film feels ahead of its time. It is a mix of traditional orchestral instrumentation and then moments of just a piano and flute or a nice mix of strings (with violins that turn into fiddles and back again). Per my reading, the score was not an afterthought, but the budget was so tight that they couldn't go the normal Hollywood large score route. Having Tim McIntire and John Rubenstein compose the score was unusual as they were mainly known as actors but they gave Pollack a tape of their music, and he gave them the job. The score works very well and I don't know if it was intentional or not to have the more traditional music give way to more of the folk sounds as a way to demonstrate the way Jeremiah was leaving society and heading into to the wild, but it feels like that.
Jeremiah Johnson is a great film that pulls no punches. I could easily see this being made 10 years earlier and have a happy ending and that would have taken away some of the needed hurt that Jeremiah went through. If he didn't have scars at the end, the journey would have felt cheap.
This is great a great film. Just make sure you have a blanket to wrap yourself in. For warmth and to hide your manly tears.
Western Checklist (nowhere near official or scientific):
- Weird gang member names? There were a few Indian names that stood out. Paints-His-Shirt-Red, Chief Two-Tongues Lebreaux.
- Beautiful landscapes? YES. The whole damn film.
- Any terrified horses? I am sure there were a couple. That one grizzly bear in the clip above didn't look too happy. Also, there was a wolf fight here that I wished had been in The Grey. Side note: Come to think of it. I could go for a Liam Neeson mountain man western. Granted, all the animals would flee in terror when they saw him approaching, but I would still watch it.
- How many Ernest Borgnines? The only person I know from this film other than Robert Redford is director Sydney Pollack. He had a small role in a decent episode of the Twilight Zone. Oh, and won Oscars and such, too.
- Does it have a theme song with the name of the film in the title? Yes, but not how you think. It is was more of accent to his story, like a signing narrative, versus a straight up song. Check it out below.
- And here is more of the score. I had to link more of it because it is lovely.
- And here is a link to a piece of music that you can't convince me that was not inspired by Jeremiah Johnson for an alpine snowy mountain zone in World of Warcraft. I really do love the music of Grizzly Hills. Lots of Grizz to hunt there, too (Its in the name!).
- And now I finally know where this .gif comes from. It will forever make me smile.
Rating:
I am going to give this 5 out of 5 tin stars. Jeremiah Johnson is a beautiful but brutal film about what it takes to survive in a land that has its own rules. Robert Redford gives a great performance that makes you sympathize with him all throughout the film. The direction/cinematography are great and the score fits like a warm bear skin coat.
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