Jeremiah Johnson is the best frontier movie
That I've seen anyway. Spoilers.
Jeremiah is a disillusioned American soldier who was traumatized by war and wanted to retreat to a peaceful, lonesome life in the mountains. But as he is initially characterized as a naive, delusional noob, he totally fails to realize that he's not leaving the war behind, he's voluntarily stepping into an even worse one. It's not just getting into life or death battles with bears, wolves, and even nature itself, he's casually walking into a post-apocalyptic hell world, a swirling vortex of genocidal hatred and conflict, where the physical beauty of the landscape conceals the unimaginable horror of mass death and complete societal collapse that happened here. Dark vibes that still linger as a creepy backdrop in any frontier story. Like the ghosts of all the people who died from smallpox and manifest destiny are still there, silently haunting the land, brutally erased from the human story. Their history, culture, bloodlines, languages, just wiped off the face of the earth like they were never even there in the first place. And here comes Robert Redford to build a log cabin :)
The remnants of the native tribes we see in this movie really communicates it. They're an emaciated husk of what they used to be, and this could be me reading into it, because I just watched Last of the Mohicans last week also, but the sense of loss is palpable. A town is a pitiful little collection of tipis on the prairie, and you never see more than a handful of Crow at once. The reason this works so well is because it's never directly stated or laid on, they just leave it for you to feel. The creepiness of the American frontier is very similar to the eerie emptiness of an abandoned mall; this is IDEAL land, absolute paradise, it's beautiful, fertile, ripe with game and resources, this is exactly the sort of place where you should find society flourishing in abundance. It's BUILT for human habitation. And yet, Jeremiah goes on MONTHS long stretches without seeing a single person except a frozen corpse. The contrast is a constant reminder of why that is, and it never lets you feel comfortable despite the rolling green plains and idyllic mountain vistas inviting you into this little window to paradise.
The kitschy music and 'golly gee my family got murdered' tone had me skeptical until I finished, but I realized by the end that it actually contributes to the genius of this movie. That's the frontier ethos, you never really see any of these guys or any of the contemporary cultural commentators fully acknowledging the sheer horror of this place and time. Because then the entire American mythos really comes crumbling down. It's a perfectly artistic way of capturing not just the frontier itself and what it really was, but how it was viewed and related to by the people IN the movie. Jeremiah's desire to be a pacifist goes out the window when the Crow murder his new family, but when he's talking to his only friend on the plains about it when they meet back up some time later, all he can really say is "They weren't no trouble at all". Whether it's the inherently numbed moral ethos of the settler, or denial and disassociation of how dark and bloody this all is, the way the frontier was received and understood in culture even up to today- but certainly a lot more so back then, is upsettingly ill-fitting to what was really happening out there. The jarring contrast between a goofy, mildly glum little gee-tar ballad and this guy turning into fucking Guts from Berserk, being hunted down every single night by Crow assassins after they got into a vicious blood feud over the murder of his family and the consequent revenge killings, is one of the most striking elements of the movie.
But I think my favorite little touch is the inciting event in the narrative that turns everything on it's head. Jeremiah was actually doing pretty well with the Crow, they were getting along fine and he went out of his way to not make trouble and they even let him make a nice little homestead on their territory. You start thinking, maybe this is going to be a nice little movie about a man finding peace after all. The narrative after this quickly descends into all out mortal combat that represents the mutual hostility of the settlers and natives, but the movie makes sure to point out that it is ultimately all the settlers fault and any 'sin' committed by the natives on their own land is downstream from the original sin of the white man, literally stomping all over their holiest of holies in the effort of forcing their way into someone else's society to build a new one in it's place. The reason the Crow kills his family, is that he reluctantly rescues a snowed in caravan of settlers bound for the West by showing them through the only viable path, their sacred burial site. Only a select few Crow are even allowed to set foot there at all, he KNEW this was a grave sin, but he was cajoled into leading these white settlers through because they'd have to go on a 20 mile detour otherwise. However he feels about the Crow, whatever kind of mutual hatred and violence they're capable of, the only reason any of this ever even happened is that a bunch of bungling angloid assholes wanted to come barging through land that they knew wasn't supposed to be touched, and they couldn't help but make excuses for why they just had to do it anyway.