NR | 2 h 8 min | Drama | 1946
Clarence Brown’s coming-of-age film is set in late 19th-century Florida.
The film opens with Penny Baxter (Gregory Peck) narrating why he ended up in scrub country. Following service in the Civil War, he’d sought refuge away from towns and wars and civilization and headed to the wilderness, to “the sources, the beginning of things.”
He’d intended a quiet life with his wife, Orry (Jane Wyman), cultivating crops on Baxter’s Island, a patch of land amid a “rolling sea of trees.” But tragedy struck. Several of their children died, leaving them with their lone pre-teen boy, Jody (Claude Jarman Jr.).
As the movie unfolds, it is Orry’s despondency that darkens Penny’s father-son bond with his son, not the state’s clouds, or rains, or floods. Not even disease or dangerous animals raiding their farm. Overly fearful of losing Jody too, and with only Penny to help out, Orry frets over Jody’s playfulness, convinced that he’ll carry it into adulthood.
Penny, however, prefers giving Jody time to savor the miracle of growing up in the woods and, reluctantly, allows him to adopt an orphaned fawn as a pet. But Jody adopts more than he bargained for: a new way of seeing himself and his place in the family.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel inspired the film, which won two of its seven Oscar nominations. Brown’s sober script before the opening scene makes clear who he dedicates his film to:
“We dedicate this picture to those who came to our land long ago and made it their home—and our inheritance! For us they faced the unknown. For us they hungered and toiled. Their endurance is our prosperity, their struggle is our freedom, their dream is our certainty, their dawn is our day. From their dust we spring, and reaping the great harvest of their lives and works, we remember them with blessings.”
Rawlings’s message is hidden in Penny’s backstory. He and his family live on “half-fertile” land. They must eke out their livelihood. Life, by its nature, is double-edged. Sorrow snaps at the heels of joy, as want pursues abundance.
Fittingly, Jody’s first bear hunt is a sweat-and-saliva lesson about facing fears and fulfilling responsibilities.
Hunting dogs Perk, Rip, and Julia lead Penny, gun in hand, and Jody into the forest, chasing a bear that has just savaged their farm animals. Rip and Julia fly fearlessly at the bear, but Perk flees while Penny’s gun backfires.
Seemingly inconsequential, the bear’s escape changes everything.
Coming-of-Age Story
Brown’s biblical hints are hard to miss. When Jody goes missing, it’s for three days. When he returns, it’s a resurrection of sorts; he dies to his old self, taking on the new. When Jody is sheepish about his selfishness, Penny reassures him, “When I was a child, I spake as a child.”Fodderwing, the crippled neighbor boy Jody befriends, mirrors Jody’s hobbled, willful self. Fodderwing’s idea of shielding himself from reality is to be stuck in a fantasy world of eagles, racoons, monkeys, deer, wolves, and Spaniards on big black horses! Jody’s tempted to linger, but too much of the real world awaits for him to cling to dreams.
Jody realizes that the woods may burst with wondrous sights, sounds, smells, and sensations, but if you make your home there, less uplifting moods haunt its brooks and breezes too: the drudgery of digging a well, the harshness of harvesting a crop, the solitude of stirring a dish on a fire, the aching sorrow of nursing a wounded animal or burying your dead.
Apparently, Rawlings got along fabulously with her father, who loved the outdoors and owned a farm, but she detested her socialite mother. With no obvious villain in her story, she writes Orry’s character in as a sourpuss. Still, Wyman’s interiority and depth make Orry believable. Peck is perfect as the warm, gentle Penny. The wise perspective he offers Jody at the end is a model of introspective parenting.
And for a debutant, 10-year-old Jarman Jr. brilliantly captures Jody’s tortured excitement with his expressive eyes, his expectant drawl, his unguarded smile, and the way he skips rather than walks across those beckoning hills.
