THE YEARLING: Blu-ray (MGM, 1946) Warner Archive
The recipient of this generous bequest was Tennessee-born
Claude Jarman Jr. who, even at the tender age of 10, was already a veteran of Nashville’s
Community Playhouse's Children's Theater. Jarman’s ascendance to the upper
echelons was almost as swift as his departure from the business; his introduction
to films, director, Clarence Brown’s spectacular coming-of-age saga, The
Yearling (1946) – a picture, very much close to Mayer’s own heart as it
directly played into the old mogul’s grand design for producing movies of a rarified
bucolic beauty, wed to Mayer’s own impressions and longing for a childhood
that, ostensibly, he never had. For Jarman, making The Yearling proved a
treasured experience, one, augmented not only by his snagging of a juvenile Oscar,
but by the generosity and kindness shown him along the way, by his fellow
actors, his director, and producer, Sidney Franklin, who afforded him a
handsome watch, inscribed with gratitude as a Christmas gift. “Clarence
Brown changed my life,” Jarman reflected in 2019, explaining how Brown,
having taken a few photos of Jarman to send back to the studio, almost
immediately offered him the role of Jody, leaving both Jarman and his parents
rather bewildered and not to believe their sudden good fortune. “He (Brown)
was really a professional. He was trained as an engineer. He knew exactly what
he wanted. It sometimes took 40 or 50 takes. The crew felt he was mean…but he
was not mean to me. He was tough. But he was also fun. He was very nice to me,
and actually, like a second father.”
The novel’s authoress, Marjorie Kinnan, to have wed New
York editor, Charles Rawlings in 1919, before moving to Louisville, Kentucky, had
long aspired to be a writer, but, a decade later, had yet to strike it rich on
her storytelling. The couple relocated – again - this time, to a 72-acre orange
grove in Hawthorne, Florida in the hamlet of Cross Creek, a place that would
not only provide Rawlings with her muse, but also bring fame and fortune to her
front door. Her thoughtful connection to both the region and the land was not immediately
embraced by her naturalized Floridians. Indeed, upon the publication of one of
her earliest short stories in 1930, a local mother threatened to horse-whip
Rawlings, presumably, for identifying too closely with one of her less than
flattering depictions of a ‘fictional’ character. Undaunted, Rawlings debut novel, South Moon
Under (1933) captured the earthiness of her homestead and became a finalist
for the Pulitzer. Alas, Charles Rawlings did not take to his rural surroundings
and the couple divorced that same year.
Undeniably, The Yearling endures as Marjorie Rawlings’ most anticipated
and beloved tale. And although there would be others in her creative cannon,
none would attain such notoriety. A libel suit in 1943, which Rawlings won, but
was later overturned on appeal, did much to toughen and sour her interests.
Retrospectively criticized for being an uneven writer,
Rawlings concurred that during periods of melancholic and artistic frustration
her work had, indeed, suffered. When Rawlings died of a cerebral hemorrhage in
1953, her hotelier/husband, Norton Baskin eulogized, “Marjorie was the
shyest person I have ever known. This was always strange to me as she could
stand up to anybody in any department of endeavor. But time after time, when
she was asked to go some place or to do something she would accept — ‘if I would
go with her.’” In a strange twist of fate, the reputation of an authoress
once judged in her own time as ‘inconsistent’, has only continued to ripen with
age. In 1986, Rawlings was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame, and,
3 years later, was afforded the Folk Heritage Award. In 2008, the U.S. Postal
Service unveiled a stamp in her honor and in 2009, she was named a Great
Floridian in a cultural program honoring persons who have made “major
contributions to the progress and welfare” of Florida. Given MGM’s interests
in The Yearling, and its subsequent transformation into one of the studio’s
most heartfelt and costly pictures, it is strange Rawlings had virtually no
association with it. Nevertheless, she and film’s stars, Gregory Peck, Jane
Wyman and Claude Jarman Jr., never met.
Like most great novels about childhood, the appeal of Rawlings’
prose was never exclusively intended for young readers; rather, a universal, to
be ripened in the minds of her adult readership who wept and kept The Yearling
on the New York best-seller’s list for a staggering 93 weeks! Following the
exploits of an impressionable mind, infatuated with the care of a helpless fawn
after his father has accidentally shot its mother, The Yearling is a story
of a boy finding the courage and strength from within to become a man. The
transition will be fraught with danger, tragedy and loneliness – the bittersweet
winds of change to mold and shape a young boy’s perspectives on life. Clarence Brown
– a director known for being exacting and precise, was left to grapple, not
only with a child who had never appeared before the cameras, but also a
generally non-compliant circus-sized menagerie of ‘trained’ animals, including
126 deer, 83 chickens, 53 wild birds, 37 dogs, 36 pigs, 18 squirrels, 17
buzzards, 9 black bears, and, 5 fawns. For years, rumors have abounded that the
live-action sequences involving the animals had already been shot in 1941 and
were simply inserted by Brown once production resumed in the summer of 1945 – a
claim, when once asked, Brown vehemently denied. “Hell, are you kidding?”
said Brown, “We shot everything from the beginning and for real. No
substitutes.” For verisimilitude, Brown insisted his cast wear virtually no
make-up. To this end, Jane Wyman was ordered to work on her tan while Jarman’s
tender skin was kept out of the sun in between takes, wearing a large straw
hat. Like most everything MGM did during this glorious epoch in its picture-making
prowess, The Yearling was done up with class. Such attention to detail
cost the studio plenty. Hence, despite it entering the ledgers as the most
profitable movie of the year – raking in a cool $4 million at the box office –
Metro’s profits were only a paltry $451,000. While critics and audiences cheered, co-star,
Gregory Peck was not entirely pleased with the end result, suggesting MGM’s
impressions of the rustic Florida homestead in the novel, built in the
exquisite Juniper Prairie Wilderness Park, had been plushily glamorized all out
of proportion, and, Jarman’s performance beefed up with too many tears in the
climax for which Rawlings’ description was otherwise restrained. Perhaps, Peck’s
less than enthusiastic opinion had been tainted by his weariness during the
shoot, dividing his time between the Florida locations and flying back and
forth to Texas, to begin work on David O. Selznick’s opus magnum, Duel in
the Sun.
Although The Yearling featured a stunningly
handsome original score by the studio’s resident workhorse/composer, Herbert
Stothart, for the pivotal sequence where Jody races barefoot through the woods
with his fawn, to be joined by other deer, Stothart deferred to Mendelssohn’s ebullient
Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream – a poignant departure.
Meanwhile, resident production designer par excellence, Cedric Gibbons reteamed
with Paul Groesse to create the bucolic centerpieces – a contribution to win an
Academy Award for Best Art Direction. A moment’s pause here, in honor of
Gibbons, a man of impeccable taste and vision who studied at the Art Students
League of New York in 1911, and began his career as a junior draftsman in the
art department of Edison Studios a scant 4 years later. Moving to Goldwyn
Studios, Gibbons was absorbed into the machinery of the newly amalgamated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
in 1924. His big break came a year later, assigned by Thalberg to work on the
silent version of Ben-Hur, to which Gibbons brought his passion for the art
modern style (later, rechristened as art deco). One of the original 36 founding
members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Gibbons actually
designed the Oscar – a statuette he, himself, would be nominated for a whopping
39 times, winning 11 awards along the way. For the record, both achievements
are legendary and without equal. In 1956, Gibbons retired from the fray due to
poor health, having either personally overseen, designed, or guided the
production design on a staggering 1,500 movies for the studio. A scant 4 years
later he died, age 70, leaving behind a legacy of movie-land magic likely to
remain unsurpassed. Indeed, Gibbons had built the finest art department in the
business.
With its uber-rural locations, The Yearling
does not allow for Gibbons’ usual high-sheen polish and finesse to be revealed
in dramatic ways. The manufactured settings for the picture poignantly lack such
artifice and, instead, are extensions of that raw earthiness and sun-filtered
Florida rustique to permeate the picture from first frame to its last. Our
story begins with our introduction to former Confederate soldier, Ezra ‘Penny’
Baxter (Gregory Peck) and his wife, Ora (Jane Wyman) - pioneer farmers,
aspiring to a quiet life near Lake George, Florida in 1878. Their prepubescent
son, Jody, remains the couple’s only offspring to have survived. Jody warm
relationship with his father is counterbalanced by his rather distanced one with
Ora who, haunted by the deaths of her other children, is a careworn shell of
her former self. The more sensitive Jody is repeatedly wounded by her aloofness
which he misinterprets as cruel and unjust. While Jody’s time is oft occupied
with chores, he desperately longs for a pet as his companion – a notion Penny
entertains, but Ora will not even consider. Besides, the farm is bustling with
four-legged animals already. In short order, the family discover that a bear
they have named ‘Old Slewfoot’ has returned, to have already killed one of
their calves and a pig. Penny sets out to hunt and destroy the bear,
accompanied by his dogs, Perk, Rip and Julia. Alas, his confrontation with Slewfoot
ends badly when Perk turns yellow and runs off, and, Julia is badly injured.
Penny decides to trade Perk for a new gun with his neighbors, the Forresters –
Buck (Chill Wills), Pa (Clem Bevans), Ma (the ever dependable, Margaret Wycherly),
Lem (Forrest Tucker), Arch (Arthur Hohl), Pack (George Mann), Millwheel (Dan
White), and Gabby (Matt Willis). Jody becomes acquainted with the family’s
youngest, Fodderwing (Don Gift) who keeps a menagerie of pets, but is severely
handicapped.
Alas, the Forresters are a devious lot. After Penny reasons
the family has stolen some of their hogs, Penny decides to track his animals
down, only to be bitten by a rattlesnake. Shooting the snake dead, Penny also
kills a doe, using its liver to extract the poisonous venom from his leg. Only
after this self-preservation has been achieved does Penny discover the doe had
a fawn, as yet too young to look after itself.
Jody asks to adopt the fawn, to which Penny agrees, forewarning that once
the animal is grown it will have to be let loose in the wild. Eager to share
his good fortune with Fodderwing, Jody discovers the boy has died of the fever,
a gentle Buck explaining it was Fodderwing’s intension to name the fawn, Flag, because
of its white tail. At Fodderwing’s funeral, Penny is asked to deliver the
eulogy. Quietly, he assures the grieving family of their son’s miraculous
liberation from his crippled body here on earth, walking around as easily as
anyone else in the kingdom of heaven. A year passes. Jody and Flag, now a ‘yearling’,
become inseparable. Alas, the animal, having become accustomed to Jody, will
not leave the farm. Worse, he has become a nuisance, feeding off the newly
planted crops. Penny decides, in order for Jody to ‘keep’ Flag he must replant
the devastated corn crop and build a higher fence to keep the animal out. Determined
not to sacrifice Flag, Jody works his heart out to re-establish the corn crop.
Observing his efforts from her kitchen window, Ora decides to help her son
build the enclosure. Alas, later in the evening, Flag manages to scale even
this deterrent and destroy all of Jody’s hard work.
Penny orders Jody to take Flag out to a place beyond
the farm and shoot him. Bittersweetly, Jody does not have it in him to kill
Flag, instead attempting to shoe the deer off their land for good. Unexpectedly,
however, Flag quietly returns to the farm and devours the newly planted crops. Witnessing
Flag in the garden, Ora takes dead aim with Penny’s double-barreled shotgun. Although
she succeeds only in wounding the animal, Penny explains to Jody that to allow
Flag to suffer now would be cruel. Begrudgingly, Jody agrees and, after much
agonizing, shoots Flag dead with the remaining shell. Believing his mother to
have extended her cruelty towards him to his beloved pet, and, angry at having been
made responsible to finish the kill, Jody runs away from home. Three days
later, he is found and rescued from starvation by a kindly riverboat captain
(Victor Kilian) and his first mate (Robert Porterfield). While Jody and Penny
are reconciled, Ora has yet to return from her private search for the boy. Late
that evening, Ora discovers Jody has come home safe and sound. Her fears over
losing the last of her children assuaged, a grateful Ora now enters Jody’s
room, bestowing her mother’s love on him. Bewildered by her emotional outpouring,
Jody nevertheless, and, unconditionally accepts it.
The Yearling is one of those ‘lump in your throat’ journeys
Mayer so completely believed in. Indeed, the picture is saturated in a plush
and surreal sentiment for a time and place, mostly untainted, though nevertheless,
mindful of the harsher realities of life. Arguably, such snapshots of Americana
were never to be found in nature, though nevertheless, proved as compelling to
war-weary audiences throughout the 1940’s, and, with more than a kernel of
truth to strike like a bull’s eye through the heart. “We left MGM movies with
a smile,” studio alumni, Ricardo Montalbán once astutely reflected, “…if
it was fictitious, let it be. But it really relaxed and entertained you…it was
wonderful.” The Yearling is
just such an exemplar of Mayer’s modus operandi - to create a fantasy world
where anything was possible, and where such visions of loveliness could emerge as
halcyon daydreams in glorious Technicolor – Mayer’s own personal guarantee and
confirmation that the world beyond Metro’s hallowed gates was decidedly safe
from the tyrannies and strife, brewing half a hemisphere away. There is not a
false note among the picture’s cast, the most startling and unvarnished
performance coming from Claude Jarman Jr. Reflecting on the picture’s enduring
appeal decades later, Jarman was quick to recall that the emotions and tears shared
during Jody’s mercy killing of Flag were genuine. And indeed, Jarman’s
performance here is of such a perfection, he seems to be living the part rather
than playing at it. By choice, Jarman’s movie career was short-lived. He made only
10 more movies, of which 1949’s Intruder in the Dust and 1950’s Rio
Grande have since gone on to have a life of their own. At 86-yrs.-young,
Mr. Jarman – though no longer ‘Jr.’ is still very much with us – one of the
last remaining links to golden age Hollywood, his reflections on that brief
tenure, poignantly recounted in his biography, ‘My Life and the Final Days of
Hollywood’.
No less compelling are Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. Despite
his misgivings about the way the movie turned out, Peck could definitely chalk
up his performance as the introspective and compassionate patriarch as yet another
solid turn in his ever-expanding body of work. There has never been, nor will
there likely ever be another Gregory Peck – a lanky, yet towering figure of personal
convictions. For Wyman in particular, The Yearling provided the
necessary springboard to being considered as an actress of formidable and rare
qualities. Having distinguished herself in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend
(1945), Wyman was Oscar-nominated for her performance in The Yearling, losing
out to Olivia De Havilland for To Each His Own, before taking home
Academy gold two years later, playing the devastated mute in Johnny Belinda
(1948) – the only non-speaking performance in the ‘modern’ age of talkies to be
afforded the honor. When the dust had settled, the receipts counted, and,
despite its cost overruns, Mayer could take immense pride in having contributed
yet another iconic motion picture to the annals of truly great American-made
entertainment. In hindsight, it is
awe-inspiring how much of our collected movie-land memories hail from Mayer’s
dream factory. Regrettably, from this pinnacle of success, Mayer and MGM had nowhere
to go but down, and even more sadly, in the coming decade, would illustrate their
fragility - both Mayer’s destabilizing supremacy as Hollywood’s then reigning
king maker, and, the eroding of his seemingly Teflon-coated empire, in
retrospect, incapable of surviving the fast-advancing winds of change.
The Yearling on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive (WAC) is a miracle
of loveliness. This is a reference quality disc, featuring a newly mastered 4K
scan from original Technicolor separation masters. The archival research and
meticulous preservation gone into this release has yielded an image to stand
alongside the very best yet to emerge in hi-def, regardless of the vintage, and
all the more impressive when one considers The Yearling is 75 years old!
Colors are positively robust, deep and fully saturated, while flesh tones
maintain an appropriately sun-kissed orange bent. The Florida locations, to be
intermittently lensed by a trio of cinematographers - Arthur Arling, Charles
Rosher and Leonard Smith, sparkle with the richness of early dawn or burnt
shimmer of a lazy ocher sun setting in the sky. Fine details abound, and
contrast is bang-on perfect, with velvety rich blacks and crisp, pristine whites.
Truly, an A+ effort with very few – if any equals. The 2.0 DTS mono has been
sumptuously reproduced. Extras are all ported over from Warner’s previous DVD
release and include The Cat Concerto cartoon short, Screen Guild radio broadcast
of The Yearling, and, an original theatrical trailer. Bottom line: as a coming-of-age
story, they don’t come any finer than this. Ditto for WAC’s Blu-ray. An absolute
‘must have’ disc for 2021.
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
5+
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
1
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