Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World,
Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
Films
like “Bambi” and “Old Yeller”
weren’t bent on protecting a child’s uncertain
knowledge that the world is an impermanent place, that
pets and parents and even siblings and playmates die.
And once you learn that, you might be inclined to grow
up a little, embrace and treasure those close to you a
little more.
But
that became a rare thing. A “My Girl” or “My
Dog Skip” might come along every so often. But they
create an uproar, as often as not, simply by being honest
tearjerkers.
These
days, whole websites are devoted to protecting children
and adults of the arrested development variety from cinematic
heartbreak. If you’ve ever visited “Doesthedogdie.com,”
I hope you’re blushing.
Whatever
reason our infantilized culture uses to spare the very
young from unpleasant realities, what we’re really
doing is sparing ourselves from that “adult”
conversation, or ourselves from an adult response to life’s
grim but cathartic moments.
“The
Yearling” is a classic tearjerker, a coming-of-age
tale set in America’s hardscrabble, survival-is-a-struggle
past. It’s sentimental, but a depiction of an unforgiving
place and time where just living into adulthood was not
guaranteed and just surviving in a hot, insect, snake,
gator and disease-ridden Florida was a struggle.
Marjorie
Kinnan Rawlings, a non-native who moved to Cross Creek,
Florida, to become the Sunshine State’s greatest
writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for this 1930s book set
in rustic “cracker” Florida of the 1870s.
It’s about a critter-obsessed kid, his doting dad
and lost-her-sense-of-lightness mother and their struggle
to make a home in the barely-farmable, buggy/snakey center
of the state, in the swampy pinelands where Rawlings came
to live and write half a century later.
And
yes, the title character dies. And the deer isn’t
the only living thing that perishes in this story and
the 1946 Technicolor classic that director Clarence Brown
filmed from it.
It’s
a beautiful film, poetically-scripted, tenderly directed
and perfectly cast, seamlessly blending north central
Florida locations (Hawthorne, Silver Springs and environs),
the oft-filmed Big Bear Lake corner of Southern California
and MGM soundstages to recreate a still little-settled
part of the country just after the Civil War.
The
archaic dialect practically requires subtitles.
“Now,
tell th’truth and shame the Devil, wa’rnt
that bee tree a fine excuse to go ramblin’ to?”
MGM
landed young Gregory Peck for doting dad Penny Baxter,
and his brooding romantic mental patient of Hitchock’s
“Spellbound” disappeared in this affable,
good-natured turn.
The
formidable Jane Wyman plays Orry, the local gal of limited
horizons Penny found when he moved south after the war
spent “fightin’ the Yankees.” Orry is
dour and humorless, more an authority figure than a loving
mother. What the movie doesn’t tell us is that they’d
had six children who didn’t survive infancy before
young Jody was born.
Eleven
year-old only child Jody sparkles onto the screen in the
person of newcomer Claude Jarman Jr. In the almost 80
years since “The Yearling” premiered, this
is still recognized as one of the great child performances,
up there with Jackie Cooper in “The Champ,”
Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon,” Anna Paquin
in “The Piano” or Keke Palmer in “Akeela
and the Bee.”
Penny
Baxter’s carved out a subsitence farm just north
of Cross Creek. They grow all that they eat, which is
as much as the limited land Penny’s back and their
draft horse will allow him to clear. Their livestock is
constantly imperiled by the bear, Ol’ Slewfoot,”
and by pig-rustling rednecks — their neighbors,
the Forresters.
Jody
fears his mother but idolizes his father. And at Dad’s
side, over the course of a year, the boy will experience
the terrors and glories of nature, the thin thread of
subsistence their family lives on and the pleasures of
travel — to The Forresters’ roadhouse, to
“Volusia” (the county where Daytona Beach
is located, and the steamboat lumber town of Deerfoot
Landing/Deland, which may be where they visit).
Jody
pines for a pet he can call his own. Pa’s got the
dogs, which are working animals and game to fight the
bear they set off to track after he slaughers their chickens.
A Forrester kid, Fodderwing (Donn Gift) shows off his
pet raccoon.
When
Pa is bitten by a rattlesnake and kills a deer to use
its internal organs to “draw out th’poison,”
Jody gets his wish. The deer was a doe, and to make up
for its sacrifice, Jody convinces his reluctant parents
to let him take the doe’s fawn in and raise it.
Love
and devotion and hard life lessons will follow as both
of them grow up during Jody’s eleventh year.
Jarman
lights up every scene he’s in, and Peck brings a
light touch to folksy Penny, nicknamed that by the brutish,
hulking Forrester (Forrest Tucker as the heavy) that he
cons into swapping a “no good dawg” for a
shotgun.
Henry
Travers of “It’s a Wonderful Life” plays
a kind-hearted storekeeper.
But
the heart of the picture, almost tucked into the background,
is Wyman as Orry. Like Peck, she was nominated for an
Oscar for this performance. Orry tries to tell “a
tale” by the fireplace, blank-faced relating a story
with no moral, message or punchline. Deadpan. She makes
Orry stoic and plainly fearful of investing her whole
heart in this world, this life, this husband and this
little boy. Any or all of them could be taken away in
a heartbeat, she’s learned.
Early
in my career, I worked in Knoxville, Tennessee, where
director Clarence Brown attended college and endowed his
alma mater with cash for a theater at the University of
Tennessee, and left his papers and a long oral history
interview on tape for them to archive. Writing a story
about him on the 100th anniversary of his birth, I went
through his papers — which included old screenplays
with the letters “GG” and five digits scribbled
on the margins. That was Greta Garbo’s Hollywood
phone number. Brown might have been her favorite director,
with the silent classic “Flesh and the Devil,”
“Anna Christie,” the film where “Garbo
Speaks!” among their collaborations.
In
the oral history recorded during a late life commemoration
in the ’60s, you can hear Brown talk about what
flirty “child” Liz Taylor was when she filmed
“National Velvet” with him, his reasons for
the ahead-of-its-time race drama “Intruder in the
Dust,” and his difficulties filming “The Yearling,”
getting all those locations and sound stage sequences
to fit together.
It
wasn’t until a few year later, when I interviewed
Gregory Peck for one of those “An Evening With”
movie star tours that I got an earful of how much trouble
“Yearling” was.
“It
was the poor little deer,” Peck explained. Shooting
in Technicolor required every light on the lot, and the
fawns playing the yearling would get hot in an instant
and wander off the set. You can see by the way young Jarman
has to grab him and hug him and pick him up in shot after
shot what the deer had in mind. ESCAPE.
“Clarence
finally called over a grip and sent him off to get a block
of ice,” Peck recalled. “He got that, had
it covered in straw and ferns or whatever they had in
the forest bed scene, and sat the fawn on that. He stayed
still long enough for a couple of takes.”
“GENIUS,”
Peck laughed.
A
couple of years after that, I tracked down Jarman for
an anniverary story about “The Yearling” and
Rawlings and he confirmed that whatever the glories of
his performance, his real job was” keeping the deer”
content or contained enough to get a take every time the
camera rolled.
The
bear/dog fight scene in this movie still has the power
to disturb, and whatever the American Humane Society agreed
to sign off on, you have to wonder what they didn’t
see or weren’t in Florida to observe in situations
like that. Nothing here looks faked.
But
that’s one of the reasons “The Yearling”
endures. Jody’s lessons about the harsh realities
of life come from nature and human nature. Learning to
look at loss, accept it and embrace grief is a big part
of what he learns, and what movies like this one pass
on to children on those rare occasions a film has the
nerve to challenge kids this way this one still does.
Your
film doesn’t become a childrens’s classic
and remain one by avoiding the truth, as sad as it sometimes
is.
