When I first saw the gif I thought it was Zach Galifianakis. You know the one, where the bearded guy in a fur coat against a winter wilderness nods approvingly at the camera. It’s become an internet culture staple. I was shocked to eventually learn it was in fact Robert Redford beneath that scruff, and a still relatively young Redford at that: thirty-five years old, before The Sting and The Way We Were and All the President’s Men, in the most important movie of his career -at least for him personally. Jeremiah Johnson is the story of a real-life itinerant mountain man in the mid-nineteenth century who was mainly active through the Montana Rockies. The film, directed by Sydney Pollack in just the second of several successful collaborations between him and Redford, was shot almost entirely in Utah, Redford’s beloved adopted home-state, this his first real chance to show it off in a movie. And it’s perhaps for this reason that he has cited it a personal favourite of his career.
Certainly it’s one that epitomizes Redford’s star identity rather well, a silent man of conviction with a New Hollywood kind of boyish ruggedness to his masculine western image -like a latter-day Burt Lancaster I think. He’s alone for a lot of the movie, which further enables him to cultivate this persona of resourcefulness and reverence within a wild yet beautiful frontier. It’s immersive and it can be captivating. But it can also be boring. Maybe because Jeremiah Johnson isn’t so interesting a character, and Redford’s not terribly good at playing the kind of reserved stoicism the part requires. The image is strong, the personality not so much.
The film gives a little context to Johnson at the start, we’re told he’s a veteran of the Mexican-American War travelling north to live off the land and support himself as a trapper in the mostly unsettled territories acquired by the United States in that war. He meets a Crow chief and then trains with an elder eccentric mountain man “Bear Claw” Chris Lapp (Will Geer) before striking out on his own. He adopts a boy, rescues another nomad, marries a Flathead woman and builds a home with her, losing both after reluctantly serving in the cavalry, and wages a kind of one-man war on the Crow tribe responsible. Most of these episodes are extrapolated from general stories about the real man, though tempered somewhat to better suit Redford’s persona -the real Johnson was nicknamed “Liver-Eating” for reasons this movie understandably wouldn’t touch. In fact, there are some instances of the movie straight-up rejecting the history of the man it would rather imagine as a folk hero on par with Davy Crockett. Johnson was known to scalp the natives he killed, but Redford’s Jeremiah abhors unnecessarily violence and parts ways with a companion who does do that to Blackfoot adversaries. Indeed the characteristics of the real Johnson seem embodied more by the figures who cross paths with him in the movie: Bear Claw, Del Gue (Stefan Gierasch). Redford can’t represent much that animalistic wildness, he must in some way still be heroic.
Of course, his story in the movie isn’t made up of any real heroism -his only active role of consequence is the revenge he takes on his murdered wife and son, to whom he only ever seemed modestly attached -as symbols of domesticity more than actual people. There’s honestly more passion for the dead in John Wayne’s revenge story than in this one from a far more likeable guy. It’s calculated though, this apparent blankness -Redford doesn’t reveal much of his personality but there is one there. He and Pollack and a young John Milius, who wrote the screenplay, are more interested in Johnson as an idea than a person, and Redford can embody that idea exceptionally well. In some ways, he is an avatar or surrogate for audiences just as the Sundance Kid was. The effectiveness of Jeremiah Johnson rests in whether you want to see the man or the myth. To me there is power in the myth, but the man would have been more interesting. I’d like to see Redford doing ethically ambiguous things in this, playing the grit of such a character. There’s little bits of it that remain or just have aged less favourably over time -such as his insistence against his wife’s Indigenous religious practices. And his attitude towards the Crow is something of a shoot-first-ask-questions-later mindset. But overall, he’s not very objectionable, especially for the 1970s. And that really neuters him.
The movie around him can feel a bit bland for that, it’s at its’ most exciting when he’s interacting with others. Bear Claw is a straight-up cartoon, calling Johnson “Pilgrim”, shouting almost indistinctly in a yokel drawl and dressed just about exclusively in furs that resemble his big bushy beard hanging over a necklace of bear claws. He’s almost certainly the inspiration behind the weird Bear Man from the Coen Brothers’ True Grit and only marginally less ridiculous. And yet there’s something truly invigorating about Geer’s performance. His manic attitude belies a soft wisdom, and when he shows up again at the end, years after parting ways with Johnson, there’s a graveness there too as he ponders what Johnson has had to go through in his time in the wilderness -selling the weight of that more than Redford.
Another figure whom Johnson encounters a couple times is an enigmatic Crow called Paints His Shirt Red, an apparent friend of Bear Claw. He basically stands in as a symbol of the Crow people, appearing at the end once Johnson’s legend has earned a place of adversarial respect for them to silently put to rest their conflict. There is apparently some truth in this story, that Johnson viciously fought the Crow before becoming an ally to them; but there is still an eye-rolling apprehension to the idea that an Indigenous tribe would revere so much some white guy for defeating them. This was very much a pre-Dances With Wolves climate when it comes to the relationship between Native Americans and the white man in their land. Paints His Shirt Red, evoking a classical image of the Native American as his primary purpose for the movie, is of course played by JoaquÃn MartÃnez, a Mexican actor. Johnson’s wife Swan, awarded to him by her father the Flathead Chief, is played by white actress Delle Bolton. Clearly, not the most forward movie for its’ Indigenous content; although to her credit, Bolton does play the part as someone not terribly content in the relationship she’s been forced into, even as she’s gracious with its’ lifestyle benefits.
Pollack’s direction emphasizes the vastness of the Utah mountain topography, such that it puts you tangibly in that wide often desolate world -perhaps to better convey Johnson’s romanticism around it, and of course Redford’s own. Though it is illustrated as unforgiving, it is serene as well -images of Johnson standing in an immaculate snowy landscape dotted by trees and the only markings being his own footprints -these stand out and are memorable where a lot of the movie isn’t. This is New Hollywood though, so the atmosphere is aided by the music of lilting folk melodies sung by Tim McIntire, who composed the score with John Rubinstein. They are an assemblage of alright tunes, the notable one of course being the Jeremiah Johnson Ballad that recurs in leitmotifs throughout. It adds well to the air of mythology the movie is aiming so hard to capture.
And as a piece of American myth-making, it’s fascinating. But that doesn’t wholly translate to it being an enticing experience. The adventures of Jeremiah Johnson are dramatically compelling, but lose something in the framing that seems so impersonal for how immersive everything else is. Much of the movie itself feels like a ballad, going through the story of this man’s wild life with vigor but little opportunity for personality to seep through. Its’ one-dimensional consideration of its’ Indigenous character certainly doesn’t help things. But it did cement the symbol of Robert Redford and his relationship to the American mountainous west (and specifically Utah) that has persisted ever since. In a way then, Jeremiah Johnson did succeed in mythologizing an American frontiersman.
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