I don’t think I’ve heard so much about a movie’s ending than I have with The Yearling. I’ve heard so much about the tragedy of the movie’s ending that actually watching the movie was a weird experience, in that I almost felt like I had seen it before. It’s unexpected today to find real sadness in films aimed at kids, but in the 1940’s, filmmakers didn’t seem to mind making the children cry, seen originally in 1942’s Bambi, and then in this film. The animal that is the yearling in a darling creature that surprisingly doesn’t come into play until the second half of the movie, and by that time we’ve come to get to know the Baxter family, who will take in the animal, as long as it doesn’t destroy the garden that is the family’s source of food and money. The father is played by Gregory Peck (who would go on to play the ultimate father character in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird) and the mother is played by Jane Wyman (who acted and particularly looked different in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend), and together they make a strong but unsympathetic couple who may not always give in to everything their boy (Claude Jarmen, Jr, in a mature and well-observed performance) wants.

My first thought of The Yearling before I saw it was that joke in an episode of Friends, where it turns out Phoebe’s mom would turn off children’s movies when she and her siblings were younger that ended any way but happily. Phoebe remembers The Yearling as a charming and uplifting movie without a shred of sadness. Upon viewing the movie again well into her 30’s, she finds herself sticking around to the end and through the end credits, horrified at the ending that she never saw as a kid. This ending is rough. And yes, it really is. At 23 years old, I can see how I might’ve been scarred by the ending of this movie at a young age. This isn’t Bambi, where the mom is killed off camera. The death of the yearling is done in a way that lingers, on and on and on, and while we don’t see the killing, it’s done in a way that you almost feel like you’ve seen it. There may have been a handful of kids who got away with seeing this movie and not being affected by it, but I definitely wouldn’t have been one of them. You care about the characters, you care about the animal, and it’s expected but very tragic to see just where the characters and the poor animal find themselves at the end of the movie.

The movie as a whole played a little slow for my tastes, despite some wonderful performances, spectacular cinematography (that makes the movie look more modern than it actually is), and a few classic scenes. My favorite scene is one in which father and son chase after their animals who are themselves chasing a bear in the wilderness. It has shooting and editing that feels as if it were done today. The camera moves at a swift pace, and the scene is cut in fast fashion with awesome shots that appear to be real animals dueling and getting wounded. Next to the ending, it is the scene I’ll remember most from the movie. The Yearling is a film that has been known for having an almost literal warning label on it to prevent parents from showing it to their children, but I say that the movie be looked at for sure. I think movies for children today have been so dumbed down that there’s no sense of menace or danger anymore. The same is true even of today’s horror movies for teens, movies like Prom Night that are rated PG-13 and feature nothing of which people go to these kinds of movies for in the first place. When I think of the Disney movies I grew up on, like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, there was a sense of danger unlike any other. While the 1940’s offered a different kind of period for kids, the scariness and tragedy of the film must’ve worked for its audience back in the day all just the same. The Yearling won’t scar me for life now. But it sure is one of the more memorably melancholic children’s movies I’ve ever seen.