New Picture

The Yearling (M-G-M), a dazzling Technicolored version of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' 1939 Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, is one of the year's most ambitious films. It has been put together with great care, a shrewd eye for beauty and showmanship, impressive technical skill, and a staggering outlay of trouble and money. The result is not quite Art, but it is certainly fancy-quality movie.

Faithful to the novel, the film tells the simple story of a small boy named Jody Baxter and his pet fawn. After suffering a few heartaches, the boy grows older. The plot's minor themes examine the young'-un's sweet-spirited, poverty-ridden parents, who scratch a hard living from the none-too-good earth of Florida's scrub country.

Somehow, something went slightly awry when the rich, omnipotent moviemakers moved millions of dollars' worth of Technicolor equipment into the simple lives of the simple Baxter family. The Florida sky is a shade too breathtakingly blue and the piercing green palm fronds are arranged into self-consciously composed landscapes; even the dusty good earth is downright gorgeous.

The same thick, brilliant gloss is spread over the characters and their emotions. The boy Jody is well played by a twelve-year-old Tennessee schoolboy named Claude Jarman Jr. His father, Penny Baxter (described by Novelist Rawlings as a scrawny, narrow-shouldered runt), is acted with clean competence--a mite too clean --by handsome Gregory Peck, 6ft. 3 in. Glum, discouraged Ma Baxter is impersonated with affecting skill by Jane Wyman, whose talents have been wasted for years by Warner Bros, in pert ingenue roles. But even in scrubbed, unlipsticked make-up Miss Wyman's trim face & figure are a glamorized caricature of the novel's bulky Ma Baxter.

The Yearling's dramatic scenes are cunningly, almost too-knowingly manipulated, but they are nonetheless effective: the bear hunt, the ruinous rainy spell, Pa's near-fatal snake bite, the deer killing, Jody's perpetual wonder at a wonderful world, Penny Baxter's deep and tender understanding of his wife's and son's troubles. Underscoring all these emotion-mauling theatrics is a musical background that sounds as if it might have been recorded by the Heavenly Choir itself.

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