Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

Director:

Sydney Pollack

Writers:

Vardis Fisher (novel)
Raymond W. Thorp (story) ...

Release Date:

10 September 1972 (Sweden)

Genre:

Drama | Western

Tagline:

A man of peace driven wild!

Plot:

A mountain man who wishes to live the life of a hermit becomes the unwilling object of a long vendetta...

Plot Keywords:

Mountain | Trapper | Mountain Man | Rocky Mountains | Hermit

Awards:

1 win & 1 nomination

Cast

Robert Redford	...	Jeremiah Johnson
Will Geer	...	Bear Claw
Delle Bolton	...	Swan
Josh Albee	...	Caleb
Joaquín Martínez	...	Paints His Shirt Red (as Joaquin Martinez)
Allyn Ann McLerie	...	Crazy Woman
Stefan Gierasch	...	Del Gue
Richard Angarola	...	Chief Two-Tongues Lebeaux
Paul Benedict	...	Reverend Lindquist
Charles Tyner	...	Robidoux
Jack Colvin	...	Lieutenant Mulvey
Matt Clark	...	Qualen

Also Known As:

Crow Killer (USA) (working title)
Liver Eatin' Johnson (USA) (original script title)

Runtime:

108 min | 116 min (long version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.20 : 1

Sound Mix:

70 mm 6-Track (70 mm prints) | Mono (35 mm prints) | Dolby Digital

Certification:

UK:PG | Finland:K-16 | Norway:16 | Sweden:15 | USA:PG | Canada:PG

Filming Locations:

Alpine Loop, Utah, USA

Company:

Sanford Productions (III)

Trivia:

"Fort Hawley" mentioned twice in the movie was the actual historical Fort Hall, a well-known trading post established in 1834 along the Snake River in present-day southern Idaho.

Goofs:

Factual errors: The wedding song is actually a song the Salish people sing at funerals. The producers wanted a song during the wedding and the Salish don't have one. So the technical adviser, Johnny Arlee, gave them three song to choose from and they liked "Coming Home", a death song.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Narrator: His name was Jeremiah Johnson, and they say he wanted to be a mountain man. The story goes that he was a man of proper wit and adventurous spirit, suited to the mountains. Nobody knows whereabouts he come from and don't seem to matter much. He was a young man and ghosty stories about the tall hills didn't scare him none...

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "The Simpsons: The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson (#9.1)" (1997)

What a movie should be

Jeremiah Johnson is a starkly simple story well told. It is the journey of a man who seeks to re-make himself. Johnson becomes disillusioned, like Thoreau and even Ulysses S. Grant, by the Mexican War and deserts to become a mountain man. There he finds the Rockies starkly beautiful and completely without mercy for him or anyone else. Will Geer plays the older trapper who teaches the 'Pilgrim,' a very solid performance by Redford, how to survive. The film's treatments of Whites and Native Americans is profoundly even handed, and Milious's fingerprints are noteworthy in the robust and calculated course of the narrative.