The Yearling

Actor Claude Jarman Jr. died earlier this year at the age of 90. It's not overly surprising that he didn't get a full prime-time programming tribute. Instead, he's one of the people being honored in tonight's schedule of movies dedicated to people who left us in 2025. Jarman is one of the stars of The Yearling, which comes on at 2:00 AM.

Jarman, who was about 12 years old at the time, plays young Jody Baxter. He lives in a backwater part of Florida around 1880, together with his parents Ezra nicknamed Penny (Gregory Peck), and Ora (Jane Wyman). They're hardscrabble farmers, living the sort of life that Thomas Hobbes may have been thinking of when he called it "nasty, brutish, and short". It's certainly been short for Jody's siblings who are all dead. The land is swampy, the family is always one bad harvest away from starvation, and don't even have a well on their property. You have to wonder what sort of life Ora had before getting married to Penny.

So it's a disaster when a bear kills some of the livestock, and one of their hunting dogs gets injured as father and son chase after the bear. It isn't the first disaster to befall the family, and it isn't going to be the last either. Yet Jody seems surprisingly equanimeous about the whole thing, as though he's got a whole lot of maturing to do. Indeed, he's certainly going to seem immature when it gets to the main plot of the movie, although we still have a good ways to get to that because The Yearling is a fairly slow-moving movie, in keeping with the pace of life in the rural south of that era.

Eventually, another disaster does happen, when the Baxters are looking for some of their pigs that have gone missing and might have been stolen. While tracking through the piney woods, Dad gets bitten by a rattlesnake. Instead of sucking the venom out, an apparent folk remedy is that if you can get a deer liver, that will suck the venom out. So Dad is able to kill it and get enough of the venom out that he's going to recover. However, it turns out that the deer had a fawn.

Now, this is where the movie goes around the bend. Jody should be old enough to know how precarious an existence the family has. But instead, he wants to raise the fawn because the poor thing doesn't have a mother any more. Ora is strict and smart enough to know this deer is going to be trouble; just ask any modern-day person who's tried to grow a garden in an area with deer. Sure enough, the deer starts eating crops. Jody cries and cries that his Mom is being too strict and that Jody can build a bigger fence. But eventually things go too far, and Jody is going to have to kill the yearling himself, leading up to a rite of passage and an eventual happy ending.

The Yearling was made in color with a lot of location shooting, two things which help the movie. The acting is also quite good, with Jarman getting an honorary juvenile acting award. But the script is unbelievably mawkish in addition to making Jody look shockingly immature.

Note that The Yearling is getting another airing on TCM on December 30 at 5:45 PM as part of a day of animal films.