Plot
Ezra "Penny" Baxter (Gregory Peck), once a Confederate soldier, and his wife Ora (Jane Wyman), are pioneer farmers near Lake George, Florida in 1878, 13 years after the American Civil War ended. Their son, Jody (Claude Jarman, Jr.), a boy in his pre-teen years, is their only surviving child. Jody has a wonderful relationship with his warm and loving pa. Ora, however, is still haunted by the deaths of the three other children of the family: she is very somber and hard-hearted and is afraid that Jody will end up dying if she shows her parental love to him. Jody finds her somewhat unloving and unreasonable.
With all of his siblings dead and buried, Jody longs for a pet to play with and care for. Penny is sympathetic and understanding, but Ora is disgusted. One day, when a rattle snake bites Penny, they kill a doe and use its organs to draw out the poison. Jody asks to adopt the doe's orphaned fawn. Penny permits it, but warns Jody that the fawn will have to be set free when it grows up.
Jody goes to ask his frail friend Fodder-Wing to name the fawn only to find he has just died. However, Fodder-Wing's older brother tells Jody that Fodderwing had said that if he had a fawn he would name him Flag -- for the critter's waving white tail.
Soon, Jody and Flag are inseparable. One year later, Flag has grown up and becomes a total nuisance to the household and farm; he eats newly-grown corn, destroys fences, and tramples on tobacco crops. Penny orders Jody to take the deer out into the woods and kill it with a rifle. Jody takes the deer out, but does not have the courage to kill it. Instead, he orders the deer to go away and never return. But Flag comes back to their property. Finally, Ora (whom Jody believes had always hated his pet) takes the gun and shoots it, but only wounds the deer. Penny orders Jody to put the deer out of its misery. Rather than let his pet deer be in agonizing pain, he follows his father's orders.
The loss of Jody's beloved pet deer proves too much for him to handle: Overwhelmed with anger and despair, he runs away from home. Three days later, he is rescued by a friendly boat captain and returns home. He and Penny quickly make up. Penny tells him that Ora had been out searching for him. Just before Jody goes to bed, Ora returns and sees that he is back. She becomes filled with happiness and emotion, knowing that her huge fear of losing her last child is now over. She happily runs into Jody's room and showers him with more affection than she ever gave him. She is no longer afraid to show her parental love to him.
Read more about this topic: The Yearling (film)
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)