The Novel

>The Yearling was a novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings that was published in 1938. It became a Book of the Month Club selection for April 1938, and ended up as the best-selling novel in the United States for that year with over 250,000 copies sold. In 1939, it won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. The Yearling has been translated into almost thirty different languages.

> Apart from the 1946 film, The Yearling has been adapted as a Broadway musical in 1965, a Japanese cartoon in 1983, called Kojika Monogatari and a television film in 1994 with Peter Strauss, Jean Smart and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

> A "yearling" is a deer that has reached its first birthday, but not its second.

The Making of the Film

> This was not the first attempt to film Marjorie Rawling's novel. In 1941, MGM and producer Sidney Franklin started to film The Yearling with Victor Fleming, most famous for Gone With the Wind (1939), as director. Spencer Tracy was cast as Penny, Anne Revere as Orry and a 13-year-old boy from Georgia named Gene Eckman was to play Jody. The cast and crew went down to Ocala, Florida to shoot on location, but it turned into a disaster: insects invaded the set, the weather was terribly hot and rainy, the studio didn't think Eckman's acting was very good, and > Fleming and Tracy did not work well together. After only three weeks, the studio stopped production and sent everyone home, which cost MGM $500,000.

In 1944, producer Sidney Franklin tried once more to make The Yearling, this time with Clarence Brown directing, Gregory Peck starring as Penny and Claude Jarman, Jr. as Jody. In May 1945, MGM sent their new cast and crew back to Florida, where most of the film was shot on the banks of the Silver River and in the Juniper Prairie Wilderness in the Ocala National Forrest. Today, "The Yearling Trail" is a hiking trail that lets visitors see the areas where Calvin and Mary Long, who inspired the writing of the novel, actually lived.

> When outside scenes were finished in June, everyone went back to MGM in Culver City, California to shoot the indoor scenes. According to author Gary Fishgall, it's not clear whether an actress named Jacqueline White had been brought to Florida to play Orry (and was later replaced by Jane Wyman) or to only appear in long shots as a stand-in for Wyman.

> The town sequences were shot on a set built at Lake Arrowhead, in the mountains above Los Angeles. Wyman enjoyed shooting up in Arrowhead, and remembered that everyone was given their own house on the lake during filming. Wyman's husband, Ronald Reagan, joined her in Arrowhead and he would cook barbeque for the cast and crew.

> The Yearling was a happy experience for everyone involved. Claude Jarman liked working on the film, even though director Clarence Brown wanted everything to be perfect and would shoot a scene thirty times until he got it just right. Working with children and animals is a lot of work, but Jarman said that Gregory Peck was wonderful. "He was very patient, just very easy to get along with, made things very easy for me." Jane Wyman also liked working with Gregory Peck, calling him one of her favorite actors.

> Unfortunately, Clarence Brown couldn't be patient with the deer, which are very hard to train. The actors simply had to redo a scene until the animal did what they wanted it to do. One scene, according to Gregory Peck, took three days and seventy-two attempts to get right. The problem wasn't with any one particular deer, because over thirty different deer were used to play Flag. Since the movie was only going to be filmed over a couple of months, one deer couldn't grow fast enough from a fawn into a yearling in such a short amount of time.

The Legacy

>The Yearling was released in Los Angeles in December 1946 to make it eligible to be nominated for an Academy Award in that year. When it was released nationwide in January 1947, it was very well received by the critics, even The New York Times Bosley Crowther, who could be very harsh, loved the film. He wrote, "It isn't very often that there is realized upon the screen the innocence and trust and enchantment that are in the nature of a child or the yearning love and anxiety that a father feels for his boy. [...] But, we've got to hand it to Metro and to everyone who helped to visualize The Yearling from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' great novel of that name; they have caught these rare sentiments and beauties in this picture. [...] Clarence Brown, who directed for Metro from Paul Osborn's excellent script, has revealed both his heart and his intelligence in keeping the whole thing restrained. [...]" Crowther called Claude Jarman's acting "as haunting and appealing as any we've ever seen. Spindly, delicate of features and possessed of a melting Southern voice, he makes not a single sound or movement which does not seem completely genuine."

> At the 1946 Academy Awards, The Yearling earned Claude Jarman a special Juvenile Award for "For the outstanding child actor of 1946." The film also won Best Art Direction (Color) for Cedric Gibbons and Paul Groesse, Best Interior Decoration for Edwin B. Willis, and Best Cinematography (Color) for Charles Rosher, Leonard Smith and Arthur Arling. The film also received nominations for Best Motion Picture, Best Actor for Gregory Peck, Best Actress for Jane Wyman, Best Directing for Clarence Brown and Best Film Editing for Harold F. Kress.

By Lorraine LoBianco