What happens at the end of Jeremiah Johnson? The answer is a single wordless gesture
Sydney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson came out in 1972, was written by John Milius and Edward Anhalt, shot across Robert Redford's adopted Utah, and screened at Cannes that year. It runs on very little dialogue and ends on almost none at all.
Johnson meets Paints-His-Shirt-Red (Joaquin Martinez) on horseback, several hundred yards apart. He reaches for his rifle, expecting a duel. The Crow chief raises an open palm instead. After a long pause, Johnson raises his hand back. Pollack freezes the frame, the ballad's closing line plays, and that's the film.
What the gesture settles
Paints-His-Shirt-Red is the presumed force behind the Crow warriors who have been coming for Johnson one at a time — an honour code that had them arrive singly rather than en masse, which is why Johnson is still alive to see the end of the film. He has killed every one of them.
Their families are gone; his is too, after the raid on his cabin.
The raised palm is the chief calling it off. Johnson's answering hand, delivered with a tight, unhappy smile, is acceptance rather than reconciliation. The film's last words are a lyric — that some folks say he's up there still — which places him permanently in the mountains and declines to say whether he's alive.
The line just before it
The scene ahead of the encounter is Johnson's last meeting with his old mentor Bear Claw (Will Geer), who takes one look at what the feud has cost him and asks the question the film never answers:
"Were it worth the trouble?" Bear Claw asks in the 1972 film.
Johnson's reply is two words: what trouble.
Was he supposed to die?
Yes, originally. The plan had Johnson killed at the end, with Paints-His-Shirt-Red sent to finish him. The finished film swaps the death for the salute and leaves his fate open.
What's it based on?
Two sources: Vardis Fisher's novel Mountain Man and Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson by Raymond W. Thorp Jr. and Robert Bunker, whose rights producer Sidney Beckerman picked up in April 1968. The real John Johnson was a Mexican War veteran turned trapper with a considerably grislier reputation than Redford's version.
For the record: the film's most-quoted moment isn't in the ending at all. It's Bear Claw's nod to the camera in the mountains — the one the internet spent a decade turning into a reaction GIF.