Jeremiah Johnson (Widescreen Edition) | 
| Director: Sydney Pollack
Actors: Robert Redford, Will Geer, Delle Bolton, Josh Albee, Joaquin Martinez
Studio: Warner Home Video
Buy New: $39.95
New (1) Used (5) from $4.98
Rating:  127 reviews
Sales Rank: 23094
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Letterboxed, Widescreen, Ntsc
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Media: VHS Tape
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 116 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 4.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0790732556
UPC: 085391550631
EAN: 9780790732558
ASIN: 0790732556
Theatrical Release Date: 1972
Release Date: October 14, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new -- factory sealed, widescreen version
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Amazon.com essential video
After they first worked together on the 1966 film This Property Is Condemned, director Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford continued their long-lasting collaboration with this 1972 drama set during the mid-1800s, about one man's rugged effort to shed the burden of civilization and learn to survive in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. Will Geer is perfectly cast as the seasoned trapper who teaches Jeremiah Johnson (Redford) how to survive against harsh winters, close encounters with grizzly bears, and hostile Crow Indians. In the course of his adventure, Johnson marries the daughter of a Flathead Indian chief, forms a makeshift family, and ultimately assumes a mythic place in Rocky Mountain folklore. Shot entirely on location in Utah, the film boasts an abundance of breathtaking widescreen scenery, and the story (despite a PG rating) doesn't flinch from the brutality of the wilderness. --Jeff Shannon
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| Customer Reviews: Read 122 more reviews...
 A PG narrative of "Liver-Eatin' Johnson" November 27, 2003
MaynardG (Westminster, CO United States)
213 out of 223 found this review helpful
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.
"The day that you tarry is the day that you lose ..." July 2, 2004
Themis-Athena (from somewhere between California and Germany)
86 out of 93 found this review helpful
He was a big 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 behind 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.
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 legend, opening with his arrival at the fort where he buys his first horse and gun. "Ride due west as the sun sets. Turn left at the Rocky Mountains," is a trader's goodnatured answer to Johnson's naive inquiry where to find "bear, beaver and other critters worth cash money when skinned." But soon he finds that his lowland skills no longer do him any good, almost starving in the freezing mountainous winter before being taken in by old "griz" hunter Bear Claw Chris Lapp (Will Geer in a stand-out role - his and Redford's deadpan exchanges alone make this movie worth its price).
Setting out on his own 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 watch her family massacred by Indians (Allyn Ann McLerie) and reluctantly agreeing to take charge of her son (Josh Albee) - a boy grown mute 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 appreciate and, eventually, love 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 myth.
"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 actual Montana setting): despite studio budgetary limits shot entirely on location, the film had Redford acting as a virtual tour guide to the magnificent Wasatch, which he had recently made his home himself.
But the movie also shows enormous restraint, particularly given its violent underlying story. There's no blood-gushing "Braveheart"-style, no dramatic score; fights are mostly one-on-one, occurring as they would in real life - silently, with only the opponents' grunts being heard - and despite his fearsome epithet we never actually see Johnson eat a dead Crow warrior's liver. (Reportedly a script change on which Redford insisted: wisely so.) Similarly, Johnson's and Swan's relationship builds on small symbolic gestures, moving from his coarse attempts to teach 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 question about her reddish cheeks. - Further, there's no dramatic conclusion; no final battle: as Johnson's myth 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, Bear 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 way or another in several subsequent movies).
Despite its languid pace and although just under two hours long, "Jeremiah Johnson" formally takes an epic approach, 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 narrative 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 much, particularly in the middle of the ride through the Crow burial ground (incidentally a screenplay addition designed to give the Indians a reason to punish Johnson and not make them appear as mindless killers). In my view this breaks the dramatic tension rather than enhancing it; problematic insofar as virtually all that remains thereafter is Johnson's gradual withdrawal into the mountains and fights with the Crow. But no matter. This is a terrific movie, featuring great banter with Johnson's fellow hunters as well as some wonderfully delicate scenes with Swan, showcasing some of North America's most dramatically beautiful scenery, and growing on you more and more the more often you watch it.
And some say he's up there still ...
"The way that you wander is the way that you choose. The day that you tarry is the day that you lose. Sunshine or thunder, a man will always wonder where the fair wind blows ..."
(Lyrics, Jeremiah Johnson's theme.)
Also recommended:
Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson (Midland Book)
Mountain Man: A Novel of Male and Female in the Early American West
The Redrock Chronicles: Saving Wild Utah (Center Books on Space, Place, and Time)
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here
Audubon: Grizzly & Man
A River Runs Through It (Deluxe Edition)
These Rare Lands
Unforgettable Masterpiece From Director Sydney Pollack! March 20, 1999
24 out of 27 found this review helpful
Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of Out of Africa team up (the 2nd of their 6 films together) for this powerful saga of a man whose determined search for contentment leads to back-breaking, even mind-breaking hardship, and to constant battle with hostile native Americans. This absolutely unforgettable and spectacularly beautiful, yet haunting adventure film captures both the epic scale of an unconquered Nature and the small, frustrating, hard scrabbling struggles of a lone man desperately trying to start a fire during a gale-force blizzard, cross a meadow knee-deep in snow or catch something, anything, to eat. Filmed entirely on location in winter-time Utah, this movie captures on film Jeremiah Johnson's (Robert Redford) attempt in the mid 1800s to become a mountain man, seeking solitude in a wilderness whose purity he never questioned. This film is sure to find it's way into the private library of every connoisseur of superb movie making, and is one of those very rare films you can enjoy again and again! Masterpiece!
 A great movie, dissapointingly edited December 27, 2004
Richard A. Bonyak (New Castle, PA)
21 out of 25 found this review helpful
The original Jeremiah Johnson was a beautiful, violent, tragic, epic of love, hate, vengance and redemption. It was with great dissapointment and some anger that I discovered that the producers of the DVD have shortened the movie, eliminating most of the scenes of violence and basically rendering it a collection of nice shots of the Utah mountains. This has been done without explaination, apology or even warning; the movie is now less than two hours long (but with intermission intact) and contains many clumsy cuts in the last third, during the indian fighting scenes. The remaining film still contains a shadow of the original epic but I wish it had remained intact.
An American Masterwork! July 12, 2003
Barron Laycock (Temple, New Hampshire United States)
18 out of 20 found this review helpful
If one can point to a single film that served to establish Robert Redford's credentials as a bankable movie star and a man willing to explore interesting and provocative stories and issues, it was this absorbing fact-based tale of a former U. S Army veteran turned reclusive mountain man named Jeremiah Johnson. The movie caused such a stir in the American west that when I lived there briefly in the mid 1970s, shortly after its theater release, there were many, many urban refugees making a stab at following Johnson's legendary example of a return to wild nature theme along Utah's Wasatch front. One would find mild mannered, longhaired, and heavily bearded young men with their well scrubbed blond haired women padding through the local Ogden, Utah supermarkets in their simple threadbare clothing, looking for basic provisions of Cheerios, Cheetos and California wine, climbing back into their muddy Jeep Renegades, and disappearing back into the wild places. The movie itself is a joy to experience, a travelogue of the Rocky Mountain West, with breath-taking vistas and wide-angled panoramas of the rugged mountain terrain providing a magnificent backdrop to the unfolding tale. Johnson (Redford) is fleeing what he regards the senseless futility of modern (circa 1850) civilization, preferring to live a life of true rugged individualism, and endeavoring to survive long enough to become a mountain man. In the midst of his feeble first attempts to do so, he encounters a wise old goat played beautifully by the late Will Geer, and through Geer's tutelage Johnson gradually evolves into a skilled and self-reliant practitioner of the art of bare-knuckled survival. And we come to care about his man who wants nothing so much as a more meaningful and more centered existence. Of course, there is trouble along the path to such a life, and the fractious interplay between arrogant soldiers and unpredictable Indians living in the mountains provide the coda to which his actions and eventual legend begins to unfold. Johnson gradually finds company both by way of a lovely and loving Indian woman, and an orphan he takes in after rampaging Indians murder the boy's family. One of the most interesting of the themes of the movie was the way in which the reasons, issues and concerns of Native Americans are portrayed, so that one sees them more as the complex, intelligent, and complex people they were rather than as the cardboard villains Hollywood has characteristically painted them as being. In essence, this was an attempt by Redford to give a thought-provoking and thoughtful message about the nature of our culture and the importance of respect for different ways of living as well as different forms of culture, with his conclusion leaving us asking some important questions about prevailing cultural presumptions and the way we view ourselves and others. I ask the viewer to watch the final frames carefully, as Johnson provides a friendly greeting to an Indian brave, providing the signal the long war between them is over, as they pass dangerously close to each other. Some less diligent viewers suggested, to Redford's intense later frustration, that he was giving the brave the finger! Redford shook his head in disbelief, wondering aloud how anyone could possibly come away with such a notion from what he had presented so well cinematically. All in all, a great film, and one I heartily recommend for your collection. Enjoy!
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