Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

Film: Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

Stars: Robert Redford, Will Geer, Stefan Gierasch

Director: Sydney Pollack

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Robert Redford: click here to learn more about Mr. Redford (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Robert Redford has always looked like a movie star.  But earlier on in his career, he was breathtaking in a way few male movie stars had ever been to that point.  He was a genuine pretty boy, and while attractive men have long been at-home in Hollywood, frequently men this good-looking had to have a wilderness period where they prove themselves.  This was the case for Redford.  He famously tried to get the lead in The Graduate, but was too good-looking (the role ended up making Dustin Hoffman into a star, and an Oscar-nominee); he was similarly turned down for the George Segal role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (which got Segal an Oscar nomination).  But in the early 1970's, in the wake of the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford used his movie stardom to not just make money, but to force Hollywood to take him seriously as an actor.  Between 1972 & 1976, Redford started off a run of movies with Jeremiah Johnson that would include The Way We Were, The Sting, The Great Gatsby, Three Days of the Condor, and All the President's Men.  These were all box office smashes, but more importantly to Redford's long-term career, they were all critical successes as well (save maybe The Great Gatsby, which had the dubious distinction of being a Francis Ford Coppola-written movie the same year he made The Godfather Part II & The Conversation, a comparison most films would suffer in comparison to).  Redford got his first (and only, to date) Oscar nomination for acting in The Sting, and by the end of this run, pretty-or-not, he was never going to have to worry about being taken seriously as an actor again.

(Spoilers Ahead) This season is about westerns, and so when selecting a title from this run, I had to pick Jeremiah Johnson, the one western he made in this series of hits.  The movie is largely the Redford show, playing a fictionalized portrayal of the real-life mountaineer Jeremiah Johnson, who in the picture has just finished his time in the Mexican War, and has decided to go out into the wilderness & live a solitary life.  This is largely what he does, though he meets a few characters along the way, including Will Geer's Bear Claw, who mentors him in the ways of the mountains before he becomes a frozen corpse (this is how he gets his gun in an opening scene).  Throughout the film, we do see some growth in him especially after he becomes an accidental father (adopting a young boy as his ward) and husband (a Native American woman is given to him as a gift).  In the back-half of the film, after his wife & son are killed by the Crow tribe, he sets out on revenge, but eventually finds a peace with the Native Americans after they respect that both sides have suffered enough.  The film ends with him essentially folding into the myth of the mountains, never to be heard from again (but always a part of the place).

The movie, it has to be said, looks great.  The location-shooting (which Redford & director Sydney Pollack insisted upon) in Utah pays off in a big way with the expansive wide shots & gorgeous cinematography.  Redford, as well, looks divine in this.  Armed with a brunette beard but sandy blonde hair, he looks like a mountain man that's tumbled out of the cover of one of your mom's romance novels.  I also loved the song score, which plays in the background of the film, and I think adds a little bit of depth that the rest of the movie doesn't have the weight to carry...

...because this isn't a great movie even if it's an aesthetically-pleasing one.  Redford's Jeremiah Johnson gets no substance.  I think there's an understanding here that the reason Jeremiah becomes a mountain man is PTSD from having to deal with the death & destruction he saw in the Mexican War, but there's no sense of that in any part of Redford's work.  I'll praise him for most of the rest of the month (he's one of my favorite actors), so I can say as a fan that this isn't what he's best at.  Redford's best roles are either where he's out-of-his-league (Butch Cassidy, All the President's Man) or where he's combatting the expectations of looking like the all-American man but falling short (The Way We Were, The Sting, The Natural).  Here he's doing neither, and it shows.  Also, given it's the most famous part of this movie-the blink & you'll miss it head nod scene (you know it from the gif of Redford in this movie that has dominated the internet for the past decade) happens about halfway through, and in context it also reads as a little silly (just like the meme).