This evening I watched the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson that I recorded off the TV a couple of days ago.  I had been on at some stupid time like 3am and turned out to be the deaf version – with a bloke in the corner of the screen signing.   I thought this might be a problem as one of the pleasures of this film is the brilliant scenery, but the signer only popped up when there was dialogue and there is very little dialogue in the film.

More of a problem was that the aspect ratio was a little bit wrong and the picture was a little stretched out.  Despite all that it was still very watchable.  As I have commented before, films in the 1970s were a lot more leisurely than they are now.   I’m not sure that a mainstream film could get away with it now.

The film is based on a book called Crow Killer, which is sort of a real-life story and sounds fascinating.  The person on whom Robert Redfords’s Jeremiah Johnson character is based was called Jack Johnson AKA Liver-Eating Johnson.  The liver-eating was dropped for the movie.

He had a bit of a vendetta against the Crow tribe.  In the book (and real life?) he was hunting them and eating their livers, but in the film they were hunting him.  Even in the 70s the American film industry didn’t like its flawed heroes to be that flawed I guess.

Whatever the exact details of Johnson’s life, it was a hell of a lifestyle out in the Rocky mountains in the 1830s.