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As a kid, little Jonathan (Igor Alimov) saw his parents being killed by
outlaws before his very eyes, and he only managed to escape because he hid
in a bears' cave - where he soon enough made friends with a young bear.
Later, Jonathan hooked up with a tribe of Indians who brought him up like
one of their own.
When Jonathan has grown up to manhood (and is now played by Franco
Nero), he set out to avenge his parents, and soon he had shot most of the
outlaws who killed them and quite a few others as well ... When Goodwin
(John Saxon), the leader of the outlaws, brutally gunned him down and left
him to die ... which is when Jonathan, who mysteriously survived the
shooting, realized that by trying to have his revenge, he has become no
better to the outlaws himself, and he turns his back on his path of
vengeance to live with his Indian tribe and be one with nature ...
In the meantime though, Goodwin and his army of henchmen moved to the
vicinity of Jonathan's Indian village to dig for oil, and wouldn't you
know it, they find lots of it right at the Indian burial ground ... and to
get to that oil, Goodwin just orders the Indian village to be attacked and
erradicated - something though Jonathan has expected, and thus he has told
his brothers to build all kinds of traps ... and so the supposed massacre
on the Indians turns out to be Goodwin's Waterloo, but he goes on
undeterred: Soon enough, his men have captured Shaya (Melody Robertson),
the chieftain's daughter and the fiancée of Jonathan, and this way
Goodwin lures Jonathan to him, into the white man's city, where even his
master marksmanship can't save him from being captured, being dragged
behind a horse as a sign of humiliation and then being tied to a cross and
hung up, as an example as to what happens to those who cross Goodwin's
path ...
However, Goodwin's black henchman Williams (Bobby Rhodes) starts seeing
parallels in what happens to Jonathan and what happens to the blacks all
over the country, so he smuggles a knife to Jonathan so he can free
himself ...
The finale has Jonathan and his Indians attack the white man's city and
have their revenge on Goodwin's men, Goodwin though is killed in a man to
man duel with Jonathan in a dark warehouse, when exactly the compass he
once stole from Jonathan's dieing mother and has since worn as a talisman
betrays him ...
Basically, Jonathan of the Bears was intended to be Enzo
G.Castellari's long-awaited companion piece/semi-sequel to his masterpiece
Keoma from 1976 - and comparing the
two films directly, Keoma is
without a doubt the better film, an immensely tight and atmospheric and
very unusual Western.
However, taken by its own merits, Jonathan of the
Bears isn't bad at all, an epic Western that for a change takes the
side of the Native American and trades in (and deconstructs) Western
myths, a bit like other then recent Westerns like Dances with Wolves
(1990) and Unforgiven (1992) - plus the film does not try to look
like a spaghetti Western (a style that went out of style years ago) but
tries (and succeeds) to create an atmosphere all of its own that is as far
removed from the Italian Western from a quarter of a century earlier as it
is from, let's say, John Ford ... and the whole concept actually works,
too ! Sure, the film might not be a masterpiece like Keoma,
and it definitely has its lengths (especially at the beginning) and cheesy
bits (the whole boy/bear subplot), but it also features a well-told story,
extremely well-staged action (one of director Castellari's specialities),
and a bunch of memorable actors, especially Franco Nero and John Saxon as
the hero and villain ...
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