The Yearling (1946)

The AFI Silver Theater is celebrating Gregory Peck's 100th birthday with a festival. I had already seen most of his promising features, but this one seemed worth an 11:30 AM Saturday viewing, even if my dad had better things to do.

The titular animal does not actually show up until an hour in -- unless you interpret the title to refer to main boy Jody. In late 19th-century Florida, he badly wants a pet woodland critter of some kind, but his subsistence-farming parents, especially mother Orry (Jane Wyman), forbid it. After a series of what you might call minor adventures, father Ezra, a.k.a. Penny(?!), finds it necessary to kill a doe, and Jody talks his parents into letting him adopt the fawn left behind, partly as a sort of returned favor. He dubs the fawn Flag, without appearing to realize how appropriate "Flag the Stag" would become. This being a cinematic adaptation from a book, you can guess that Jody will not get to keep Flag as long as he likes....

Jody is 11 at the start and presumably 12 at the end, but from his simple-minded, low-tact, loudmouthed behavior, I would have guessed no older than 9. Perhaps I'd think the same of most boys at the time, especially those who never went to school. In the last scene, he's deemed "no longer a yearling," but I hadn't noticed much growth in maturity.

His parents may have something to do with it. Penny's easygoing to a fault; Orry is too no-nonsense to be any fun. We see from the headstones early on that she lost three infants, and her way of coping is to try to maintain a certain distance from Jody.

I suspect that the book has a lot more to tell us. Conflicts prior to the arrival of Flag are pretty episodic. I kept expecting them to have more importance later, especially Old Slewfoot the bear, who threatens to be the primary antagonist. Instead, he becomes little more than an idea.

Speaking of which, I got concerned at the scene in which Slewfoot tangles with hunting dogs. Could I trust a '40s flick to make sure no animals were hurt, even if the final message declares the supervision of the American Humane Association? Further sources assure me they succeeded on that part -- and the bear apparently would have been on the losing end of the fight.

The technicolor imagery may give the impression of an idyllic picture, but we never find that all is well, any more than in Gone with the Wind. Family-friendly? Yes, in the usual sense. Just don't show it to kids not ready for tragedy.

Adult-friendly? It works for me overall. If you feel like watching an iteration of A Boy and His X, you won't go wrong with The Yearling.