Jeremiah Johnson

It was a bold move - some might say foolhardy - for heart-throb Robert Redford to hide his features behind a full set of whiskers for his portrayal of a 19th-century mountain man. Based on real-life trapper John Johnston (previously John Garrison, accounts of whose life informed the screenplay), Jeremiah is a disillusioned army deserter who takes to the wilds of Colorado in the 1840s in the name of self-sufficiency and solitude. He adopts a family at one point, which precipitates a violent last act. Sydney Pollack's admirable film is a meditative portrait, majestically shot on location in Utah, that eschews commercial hooks for a deeper look at man versus nature and, eventually, man versus man. Lacking in both action and dialogue, certainly, but look at that view.