A Nashville schoolboy with no training, put in front of Gregory Peck and a fawn and left to want something. Claude Jarman Jr.'s Jody Baxter in The Yearling is the performance; the decade of films that followed is a footnote to it.
Fi1m perspective
Jody Baxter wants a pet. That is the whole of Clarence Brown's The Yearling (1946), and it works because the boy playing him does not seem to be performing the wanting so much as having it. Brown found Claude Jarman Jr. at ten, in a Nashville elementary school, on an MGM talent search, and had him in the Florida scrub before he had learned any of the things actors learn. Around him the adults are all holding something back: Gregory Peck's Penny has come out here to be left alone, and Jane Wyman's Orry has buried children in the yard and does not mean to love anything else she might lose. The one unguarded face in the clearing is his.
We went in braced for the weeping the film is famous for and found that none of the pushing came from him. It comes from Herbert Stothart's score, which swells at every turn in case we had missed the point. Jarman himself is plain and steady, and the film is better acted than its reputation suggests largely because its centre is a child who has not yet worked out how to ask for sympathy.
The career was short and mostly downhill from there, which is not unusual for a boy found in a classroom. He made around eleven films through the mid-1950s. Brown took him back for Intruder in the Dust (1949), a William Faulkner adaptation about racism in which he plays Chick Mallison, and John Ford cast him as John Wayne's son, Trooper Jeff Yorke, in Rio Grande (1950). Those two are the ones worth knowing. The rest, High Barbaree (1947) and Roughshod (1949) among them, are generally reckoned poor, and by The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) he had had enough and stopped. A boy of ten can be caught on film; a boy of sixteen has to act, and nobody had taught him.
He said later that of his eleven films The Yearling was the most difficult, and he went home to Nashville to finish school, then spent fifteen years running the San Francisco International Film Festival and looking after the kind of studio picture he had once been the centre of. That is a respectable second act and it belongs to the biography. What belongs here is one film, a fawn, and a face that had not yet learned to lie. Start there, and if you go on to Rio Grande, go for Ford.
Biography
Claude Jarman Jr. was an American actor. He played Jody Baxter in the 1946 MGM film The Yearling, for which he received a Juvenile Academy Award.
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Jarman was discovered by director Clarence Brown during a nationwide talent search while in fifth grade. He appeared in further films including Intruder in the Dust (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), in which he played John Wayne’s son. After his acting career, he served as executive director of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
