If you haven’t already seen the 1972 movie “Jeremiah Johnson,” you really should.
It’s one of Robert Redford’s best movies. It’s the story of a Mexican-American War veteran who heads out West after the war to find a place far away from killing and violence.
He arrives at the frontier of the 1840s, and gradually learns the ropes of becoming a fully-functioning mountain man -- including hunting, trapping and co-existing with the local tribes.
This is a movie that my Sweet Wife and I discovered sometime after our marriage in 1979. It soon became one of our favorite films, and we had a kind of tradition to occasionally break it out on a snowy Winter afternoon.
And while the movie has a bit of a “downer” ending, we always enjoyed the story – and, of course, Redford’s top-level handsomeness Back in The Day.
But I recently learned that the “Jeremiah Johnson” story is actually based on a “true” one, at least in some Western historians’ minds.
Yes. Johnson is apparently based on John “Liver Eater” Johnston – an actual mountain man reputed to be a fierce killer of Crow Indians in Montana.
Why kill the Natives? Both the “Jeremiah” and the actual Johnston stories are in agreement on this: Crow Indians killed their wives and children, and they each exacted harsh revenge on the culprits.
While Redford’s “Jeremiah” focused on hunting down his family’s killers in a fairly sanitized way (it being sweet, gorgeous Robert Redford, after all), Johnston is immortalized for allegedly having eaten the liver of each Crow he killed – because a warrior could not enter the Afterlife without his liver, according to the tribe’s belief system.
Yeah. Kind of nasty. That’s taking revenge to a Whole Other Level, it would seem.
I recently wrote a blog about the inconsistencies between the movie, “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” and the actual building of that bridge by British POWs.
The MAIN discrepancy in those two stories is the fact that the bridge was blown up in the movie, and – in real life – it never was destroyed.
In fact, it’s still in use today.
So I get that movies based on a “true” story may be vastly different from what REALLY happened.
Of course, movies being designed as they are to bring in the ticket-buying masses, the movie version of Johnston (our boy Bob) is far more lovely than the real one.
I don’t believe the lady movie attendees would have enjoyed the film as much if the main character actually looked like the real Johnston.
Perhaps the male attendees wouldn't have enjoyed it as much, either…
(Here’s a side note on Johnston: His real name was John Garrison but he changed it – apparently after striking a military officer and deserting – to John Johnston. When the movie was made, the producers changed the name to “Jeremiah” (the real guy's middle name) -- maybe because “John Johnson” was too redundant and Jeremiah was a cooler name, Box Office-wise. And they dropped the "T" from Johnston.)
For a more in-depth discussion of this, visit: The Real Jeremiah Johnson
So I guess I’ll be looking at the movie “Jeremiah Johnson” with slightly different eyes after learning the truth about old Johnny “Liver Eater” Johnston.
Monument to Johnston in Cody, Wyoming
Okay, I have to say this: I'm not a "lady movie attendee." I'm a woman (or a female) who attends movies. I hate being referred to as a lady, because when I was a Baby Boomer kid, the word "lady" was used to describe how girls were supposed to behave, and how we were supposed to behave was limiting and sexist. Also, I don't give a damn whether the lead male actor in a film is handsome; I give a damn about whether the film is well-made and well-acted.
Having gotten that off my chest, this is a fascinating column about one of my two favorite Western movies (Dances With Wolves being the other). I knew nothing about the liver-eating…