THE YEARLING: Blu-ray (MGM, 1946) Warner Archive

 How miraculous is fate? In the late fall of 1938, MGM’s raja, Louis B. Mayer sent his talent scouts in search of a youthful, virtual unknown, capable of sustaining one of the studio’s costliest productions on his slender shoulders. The project on which Mayer was cogitating was The Yearling, based on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1938 Pulitzer prizing-winning novel of the same name. The book’s coming-of-age premise seemed a natural for Mayer’s ever-expanding roster of child stars.  Alas, fate had other designs. Begun in 1941 with a cast to include Spencer Tracy, Anne Revere, and Atlanta native, Gene Eckman (who never appeared in another film) director, Victor Fleming suddenly realized his prepubescent star was growing up much too quickly. Indeed, Eckman’s voice had dropped several octaves during filming. Meanwhile, Tracy’s patience had worn thinner than Fleming’s with producer, Sidney Franklin. A change was in order. But replacing Fleming with King Vidor was ill-advised when Vidor bowed out, leaving The Yearling rudderless. Having already spent a staggering $500,000, with virtually nothing to show for it, Mayer ordered the production shut down.  Ever the shrewd showman, however, he retained the rights to the novel, to lay dormant at Metro for another 8 years. In the wake of Production VP Irving Thalberg’s death in 1937, Mayer not only assumed absolute control of Metro’s vast empire, but had systematically shifted its focus from lavishly appointed, adult-themed spectacles to the vivacity and wholesome freshness of young people exercising their God-given vitality. Granted, MGM’s idea of prepubescence was unlike anything to be found in nature, or elsewhere in filmdom for that matter, with such alumni as Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Freddie Bartholomew and Jackie Cooper growing up under the microscope of public scrutiny. Yet, for The Yearling, Mayer truly wanted ‘a fresh face’ – someone the public had never seen, and, ostensibly, on whom he could bestow all his magical properties as Hollywood’s imminent star maker.

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

Comments

E Hunter Hale said…
What an insiteful review for this classic film. Your history of the making of the film and the artist behind it were informative and well worth reading. Thrilled to learn of the outstanding restoration given to this classic. I first saw this film in the 1950s in theater projecting at slight wide screen format. The film hadn't been reformatted for a wide screen showing and the projectionist kept adjusted the framing. One scene where the boy runs with the deer has them focused in the lower frame. Without reframing you would have only seen his head and shoulders and missed the deer completely. Sidney Franklin is a filmmaker who I have always had great respect for. He bought the rights to BAMBI and tried for years to figure out how to bring it to life on the screen. Eventually he realized that it couldn't be done as a live action film and brought it to the attention of. Walt Disney. Disney gave him a full-frame credit. In a way THE YEARLING was Frankin's expression of what he loved about nature and BAMBI. Thanks you for your very worth while writing on THE YEARLING.