The early 1970s marked a transformative period for Hollywood Westerns, as the genre became a mirror for the cultural and political upheavals of the era. Amidst the fallout of the Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, and the assassinations of icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, filmmakers began reimagining the mythic frontier not as a stage for moral clarity but as a battleground of existential crises. Yet while revisionist Westerns such as The Wild Bunch (1969) and McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) grappled with violence and disillusionment, Jeremiah Johnson (1972) directed by Sydney Pollack emerged as a unique hybrid. Though often categorized as a revisionist Western, the film’s true allegiance lies with an emerging cultural force: environmentalism. By framing the American frontier as a fragile, untamed wilderness under siege, Jeremiah Johnson diverges from its genre peers, offering a meditation on humanity’s fraught relationship with nature. Its detractors argue that it eschews the Western’s traditional narrative arcs—frontier settlement, civilization versus savagery, the lone hero’s redemption—in favor of a mythic, almost elegiac tone. Yet this very divergence cements its status as a singular work, one that transcends genre conventions to interrogate the cost of survival in an indifferent world.
Jeremiah Johnson draws its inspiration from two semi-fictionalized accounts of real-life frontier legend John Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson: Vardis Fisher’s 1965 novel Mountain Man and Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker’s 1958 biography Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson. These texts, blending historical fact with frontier folklore, depict Johnson as an archetypal “mountain man” whose decades-long feud with the Crow tribe became the stuff of legend. The film, however, takes liberties with history, streamlining Johnson’s exploits into a parable of isolation and vengeance. Screenwriters John Milius and Edward Anhalt amplify the mythic qualities of the source material, transforming Johnson into a tragic figure whose quest for solitude becomes a fatal entanglement with violence. Milius, known for his celebration of rugged individualism in works like Conan the Barbarian (1982), infuses the script with existential gravitas, while Pollack and Robert Redford—both liberal artists—temper his machismo with a melancholic reverence for nature. The tension between these perspectives fuels the film’s thematic richness, creating a work that is neither wholly conservative nor progressive but a collision of ideologies.
The narrative begins during the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), a period deliberately chosen to predate the West’s industrialisation. Jeremiah Johnson (Robert Redford), a disillusioned US Army veteran, ventures into the uncharted Rockies with the naive ambition of becoming a trapper. His motivations are not economic but existential: he seeks escape from a civilisation he finds “stiffling”. Early scenes depict his abject failure—starvation, freezing, and ridicule from the land itself—until he encounters “Bear Claw” Chris Lapp (Will Geer), a grizzled mountain man who mentors him in survival. This apprenticeship, however, is only the first of many disruptions to Johnson’s solitude.
The film’s episodic structure—a hallmark of its perceived divergence from Western norms—unfolds through a series of traumatic encounters. Johnson rescues a mute boy, Caleb (Josh Albee), after a Blackfoot raid massacres the child’s family. Reluctantly adopting him, Johnson begins to form a makeshift family, which expands further when he rescues the eccentric trapper Del Gue (Stefan Gierasch) and takes a Flathead chief’s daughter, Swan (Delle Bolton), as his wife in a transactional marriage. These relationships, however, are shattered when Johnson reluctantly guides a U.S. Cavalry detachment through Crow burial grounds, violating sacred land. The Crow retaliate by slaughtering Caleb and Swan, prompting Johnson’s vengeful crusade against them. Over years, he becomes a legend, his survival in one-on-one duels against Crow warriors cementing his mythic status. The film’s climax—a series of stylized duels—elevates Johnson from man to folklore, a figure who transcends morality to embody the wilderness itself.
The film’s thematic complexity stems from the fraught collaboration between Milius, Pollack, and Redford. Milius, a self-proclaimed “right-wing anarchist,” brought a Nietzschean view of wilderness as a crucible for masculine purity, clashing with Pollack’s humanist sensibilities and Redford’s environmental idealism. According to production lore, Milius was temporarily fired for refusing to tone down his views, only to be rehired when his replacements failed to capture the story’s mythic tone. This tension manifests in the film’s duality: Johnson’s quest for autonomy is both romanticised and critiqued, his vengeance portrayed as both noble and futile. Pollack’s direction tempers Milius’s brutality with a visual lyricism that emphasizes the land’s grandeur and indifference, while Redford’s performance—a blend of stoicism and vulnerability—humanises the myth.
Redford’s insistence on filming in Utah’s Wasatch Range was not merely aesthetic but ideological. The actor, a lifelong environmentalist, sought to showcase the American West’s vanishing beauty and critique the industrialisation encroaching on it. Cinematographer Duke Callahan’s sweeping vistas of jagged peaks and snowbound valleys render the landscape as both protagonist and antagonist. The mountains are not a backdrop but a living entity, their majesty undercut by lethal unpredictability. This visual grandeur is complemented by a haunting soundtrack co-written by actors Tim McIntire and John Rubinstein. Their melancholic ballads—performed with sparse instrumentation—act as a Greek chorus, underscoring the futility of Johnson’s quest and the inevitability of man’s smallness before nature.
Jeremiah Johnson distinguishes itself from its contemporaries through its environmental ethos. Unlike the revisionist Westerns that framed the frontier as a site of moral decay, Pollack’s film presents it as a terra incognita—a world where white settlers are the true outsiders. Set decades before the typical Western timeline, the narrative depicts a West unshaped by railroads or telegraphs, where survival depends not on superior firepower (the characters wield single-shot rifles) but on adaptation. The Crow and Flathead tribes, meanwhile, are portrayed not as simplistic “savages” or noble ecologists but as complex societies with their own codes of violence and reciprocity. When Johnson inadvertently offends the Crow by desecrating their burial grounds, the conflict becomes less about good versus evil than about cultural incompatibility. Even the “friendly” Flathead, exposed to Christianity, are shown taken other natives’ scalps scalping enemies as tokens of diplomacy—a subversion of the “noble savage” trope that underscores the film’s moral ambiguity.
For Redford, Jeremiah Johnson was more than a career milestone—it was a personal crusade. By the early 1970s, he had become Hollywood’s quintessential heartthrob, but here he sheds vanity to embody a man stripped to his primal essence. His physical commitment—performing stunts in freezing conditions and enduring Utah’s capricious weather—lends authenticity to Johnson’s ordeal. Yet Redford’s performance is not one-note: his laconic delivery and haunted gaze convey a man whose desire for solitude masks a yearning for connection. This duality is mirrored in the supporting cast. Geer’s Bear Claw, with his gruff humor and frontier wisdom, serves as both mentor and cautionary tale, while Bolton’s Swan—a character underutilised but affecting—embodies the fleeting possibility of domestic harmony. Even Tanya Tucker’s brief appearance as a frontier child hints at the encroaching future, her presence a reminder of the settlers who will eventually overrun the wilderness.
Upon its release, Jeremiah Johnson was a commercial success, resonating with audiences weary of urban disillusionment and drawn to its romanticised escapism. Critics, however, were divided. The film’s 1972 release date placed it in the shadow of New Hollywood’s annus mirabilis, competing with The Godfather, Cabaret, and The Candidate. Its episodic structure alienated some viewers expecting the kinetic energy of The Wild Bunch or the existential bleakness of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Pollack’s original vision—a nihilistic ending where Johnson dies alone—was rejected by Redford, who insisted on a more hopeful coda: a Crow chief (Joaquín Martínez) nods to Johnson, symbolizing tentative reconciliation. Though historically dubious, this choice aligns with the film’s environmentalist ethos, suggesting that coexistence, however fragile, is possible.
Despite its imperfections—uneven pacing, underdeveloped characters, and action sequences that occasionally lack urgency—Jeremiah Johnson endures as a landmark of 1970s cinema. Its exploration of environmentalism, mythmaking, and the paradox of individualism in an interconnected world feels strikingly prescient in an era of political polarisation. The film’s legacy is cemented not only in its visuals and themes but in its cultural afterlife: Redford’s bearded, fur-clad Jeremiah nodding to a Crow chief has become an internet meme, a symbol of stoic defiance divorced from context yet resonant in its simplicity. This meme, like the film itself, captures the absurdity of Johnson’s quest—a solitary man attempting to impose order on chaos, only to be absorbed into the myth he sought to escape. Jeremiah Johnson is not merely a Western; it is an elegy for the land, for its people, and for the fragile dreams they dared to dream within it.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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