Mid-Lifer's Dream Movie

Do balding, overweight, middle-aged desk jockeys dream of chunking it all, moving to the mountains and hiding away from society for the rest of their days? Yes, they do, and so Robert Redford, in concert with Sidney Pollack in 1972, provided a vehicle for our escape - though Redford hardly qualified for the typical mid-lifer description.

The appeal of this movie was strong enough for me to buy it after seeing it once on the big screen in my college days, watching it whenever it was on television, and renting it a few times in a video store. My copy's wearing thin, now, so maybe I can justify the purchase of a DVD player by getting the DVD version of Jeremiah Johnson. This rates as one of my all-time favorite movies.

The movie is based on two books: Mountain Man and Crow Killer. That it's a guy movie is obvious: a man, fleeing society (the war between the United States and Mexico; he wears the remnants of military garb) heads toward what was then merely a Territory - the Rockies of Colorado in the 1830s, during the height of the "mountain man era." After purchasing his necessaries - heavy clothes, a horse, a mule, trapping equipment and a "genuine Hawkin (gun) - you can't go no better," he heads into the mountains and disappears. And then he meets the harsh realities and stark loneliness of living as a mountain man. He almost dies of starvation and exposure, but is saved by Will Greer, playing the part of a grizzled, grizzly-hunting old mountain veteran who teaches Johnson the tricks of survival in the wilderness.

You catch glimpses - but no real explanation - of why he left for the hills. "It just ought not to have been the way it was," he tells Greer when asked why he came. The movie then teaches that "the mountains have their own ways." Johnson learns to survive, takes an Indian woman as his wife and adopts an abandoned boy as his son, only to have them all violently taken away from him. The remainder of the movie tells the story of how Jeremiah Johnson became a legend in the mountains, wreaking mad vengeance on the Crow Indians that killed his family. The violent confrontations between Johnson and the Crow warriors in this film make it a "not for kids" movie in spite of the PG rating.

Filmed in southern Utah, the spectacular wide-screen photography aptly portrays the wondrous beauty - and the stark hostility, for the unprepared - of the Rockies. I understand that Pollack mortgaged his home to help finance the film - Warner Brothers refused to budget more money for the on-location shooting, saying they would not pay more than it would cost were it to be filmed at the studio. The movie enjoyed great success, bringing in over $20 million. And I would not categorize this film as a "western," per se - it is definitely its own story - not about cowboys and gunslingers, but about a man losing his life, finding it, and losing it again in the haunting backdrop of the mountain wilderness.

"Some say he's up there still." Every time I feel the world closing in on me and the demands of living become overwhelming, I toss this tape in the VCR. The call to leave your burdens, conquer nature, to be your own person and answer to no one is always "up there" for us mid-lifers, I suppose, and it was communicated best in Jeremiah Johnson.