The actor-director team of Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack (responsible for Three Days of the Condor, This Property is Condemned, The Way We Were, The Electric Horseman and Out of Africa) scores again with this spectacularly shot yarn of a mountain trapper and his adventures near the America-Canada border in the 1850s.

Episodic in structure, the film is kept constantly interesting by its director who fills the screen with colourful little anecdotes - like the discovery of Hatchet Jack, frozen dead in the mountains, his last will and testament round his neck ("I, Hatchet Jack, being of sound mind and both legs broke"); or an eerie journey through an Indian burial ground.

Supporting characters are minor, but richly delineated by the likes of Will Geer, Matt Clark, Charles Tyner and especially former musical star Allyn Ann McLerie as a 'crazy woman' who exists to tend the graves of her massacred family.

Stunning snowscapes lend the action a primitive grandeur.