PERSPECTIVES: Oh Rare Claude Jarman-- Part 1

By James C. Johnston Jr.

On
Saturday, I called a friend, and as is my custom, I sang Happy
Birthday in
honor of his 90th
day of natality.
This time I
sang it into an answering device then hung-up. Yesterday I received a
phone call from my friend thanking me for my congratulating him, as I
put it, on the first anniversary of his 89th
Birthday. Last year, I had wished him a
Happy-Birthday-Entering-of-his-90Th-Year!
He had been amused but at the same time some-what put off by that
salutation. As a matter of fact I remembering him saying, “You know
Jimmy, I could just hate you for saying that if I thought about it.
So
I guess I won’t give it any thought.”

My
friend, in this case, is a very distinguished gentleman and Academy
Award winning actor Claude Jarman Jr. I have been lucky to have had
some very good friends in my lifetime, and one of these living
treasures is Claude Jarman Jr. If his name is familiar to you, it is
because he was a really great young actor whose film career began in
the mid-1940s, quite by accident, and the fact that he looked right
for the part of his country-boy character in his first film largely
because he needed a haircut!

Marjorie
Kinnan
Rawlings wrote a book back in the 1930s which became an overnight
classic. It was called The
Yearling. It
was about a young boy named Jody Baxter who was living with his
family in a very swampy part of Florida in the years after the Civil
War in a place she called “Islands”. His character was the only
surviving child of this poor subsistence farming couple, played by
Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, who desperately worked away every day
trying to farm under very challenging circumstances.

Against
this background, Jody Baxter, a very imaginative child of nature
whose father was a very sympathetic character who was filled with
love and compassion for humanity yet world-wise and a little on the
crafty-side, lived a life on his Everglades farm situated on land, of
sorts. This was
a lonely setting even for a lonely and deeply thoughtful child filled
with a special magic and a fantasy provided by his wonderful
imagination. But he loneliness led to his quest for a pet who could
be both a companion and an object for the love he possessed in
abundance. As warm, understanding, and loving as Jody’s father was
to him, his mother was cold, because she was afraid to give her heart
to her only surviving child, because she knew all too well that he
could be taken from her as were all of her many previous babies.

In
the course of the story, Jody’s father is bitten by a rattlesnake,
and Jody is forced to kill a doe with a baby fawn in order to secure
vital organs from the doe’s body to draw the poison from his
father’s wound. Thus Jody’s father’s life is saved by the
application of these organs while the fawn is abandoned in the bush.

With
his father’s recovery, Jody asks his father if he could rescue the
fawn and raise it, because he desperately wants a pet which will also
be a companion and
pet. The reality that the fawn faced certain death because of the
sacrifice of its mother was a life-saving fact. As a result, the fawn
was now orphaned and at the mercy of nature itself. Over his wife’s
strenuous objections, Jody’s father tells the boy to go out and
fetch the fawn back to the house and that he could have the tiny
animal as a pet as long as he raised it and kept it out of mischief
and his mother’s way.

The
rest of the book is a riveting tale of the struggle for survival in
the face of the threat of privation, storm, crop failure, predators,
and other hardships
on the Florida swampy frontier. This is the story of the coming of
age of this young Florida boy and the life-lessons to be learned by
living on the edge of this
environment. The
book was, and indeed is a pure joy to read. It stands the test of
time in its ageless lesson to be learned in the maturation of a
beautiful and sensitive human soul on what was still the wild place
in a country
newly emerged from The Civil War which had only ended a bit over a
decade past.

The
beauty of the book was not lost on Hollywood, and it was purchased
from the author in the mid-1930s to be made into a film which would
star Spencer Tracy as Jody’s father, Penny Baxter. Filming began
and then ran into one snag after another. It was rumored that Tracy
hated the project which was eventually put on hold and then abandoned
altogether as war clouds formed over Europe and Eastern Asia and the
Pacific in those troubled years before the eventuality of Pearl
Harbor and our involvement in World War II.

More
than half a decade after The
Yearling project
had ended, the war was winding down. Before the film’s release, the
war would end with a justly celebrated victory over the evil Axis
powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan whose final defeat was the direct
result of two huge atomic explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Japan. It was a now a new world into which The
Yearling was
to premier filled with anxiety which was fully justified by the
circumstances of the New World Order where we all would live under
the threat of thermonuclear annihilation as the result of the
political and cultural conflict between the dominant
United States and the other super power, The Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics.

Once
again in 1944, The
Yearling was
resurrected by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a project for producer Sydney
Franklin based on a new screen play of Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings’s
prize-winning book. The new script was written by Paul Osborn, and it
adapted Rawlings’
work with skill and a large degree of fidelity. But, most importantly
of all, this monumental effort was to be directed on authentic
Florida locations by the great and experienced Clarence Brown.

Now
Clarence Brown was no stranger to New England. Brown was born in
Clinton, Massachusetts in 1890, and he spent some time around the
Grafton area, but he also knew the South. Brown lived there during
part of his own teen years and was educated at Knoxville High School
and University of Tennessee. But as I have already observed, Clarence
Brown knew Massachusetts very well from childhood, and Brown had even
filmed here in 1935 in and around Grafton, Mass. when he made the
film version of Eugene O’Neil’s Ah
Wilderness. The
bandstand on Grafton Common was used in the film in the mid- 1930’s
and still stands there today almost 90 years later.

Clarence
Brown was an innovative force of nature who used such mechanisms as
looping to refine the quality sound and spoken dialog. This visionary
and refined technology was way beyond anything previously experienced
in cinema. If you have ever attempted to watch early films, even very
good ones, and had to suffer listening to great dialogue marred by
scratchy and crackling sound tracks, you can just imagine how
wonderful it was to hear dialog clearly and unhampered by auditory
distractions.

Clarence
Brown’s filmography includes dozens and dozens of truly great
classic films such as: Trilby
[1915], Flesh and the Devil [1926],
and 1930
Academy
Award nominated for best director films: Anna
Christie with
Greta Garbo, 1931 nominated films Romance
and A Free Soul, and
Brown should have been nominated for Anna
Karenina with
Garbo in 1935, but alas he wasn’t. Brown was nominated again by The
Academy for The
Human Comedy in
1943, National
Velvet in
1944, and The
Yearling in
1946, but in spite of these nominations the only Academy Awards
given The
Yearling were
for sound to Douglas Sheerer and Claude Jarman Jr.

Claude’s
Oscar was a special Academy Award for his fantastically outstanding
portrayal of Jody Baxter. It was presented to him at the Academy
Award’s ceremony by Shirley Temple who was herself a previous
winner of this award. In those days these special awards were shorter
and smaller than the awards presented to older actors, and Shirley
Temple, Claude, and other recipients later asked The Academy to
correct this practice. As a result Ms. Temple, Claude, and the
handful of other honorees received full size Oscars. So now Claude
has two Academy Awards of two different sizes. He sent me a photo of
his adorable daughter Charlotte posing with an Oscar in each hand.
She actually looked as if she could be a contender for them given a
few years and an opportunity.

To
this day, to see Claude’s acting in the Yearling
is totally amazing. Claude was on screen almost the entire length of
this long and episodic film. His portrayal of Jody is totally
credible to the point that you are no longer watching a child actor.
You are in fact watching an authentic Southern boy in the real
emotional throes of coming of age in 1878 surrounded by the
Everglades of almost a hundred-and-fifty-years ago. Claude’s
performance as Jody Baxter is so real that the time passes watching
the beautifully photographed film with such a degree of speed and
pleasure that it is as if you are observing life itself. One even
tends to forget that what one is seeing is a movie, and instead, it
is like watching life unfold before one’s eyes in real time.

In
1948, Claude was to deliver a profoundly realistic performance again,
as the young protagonist Chick Mallison, in William Faulkner’s
screen interpretation of his seminal novel Intruder
in the Dust. Once
again, Clarence Brown would be the great director who would be making
a revolutionary film, a ground-breaking motion picture about murder
and racism in Oxford, Mississippi in the Mid-Twentieth Century. We
can witness an actual ugly social history unfold before us, because
this groundbreaking film was one of the first to introduce the
realistic theme of racism which had been until now a silent reality
that dominated not only Southern Society but all of national life.

The ugly reality of racism was the great unspoken and untold national
story of the time and the huge and largely unaddressed racial issue
boiling just under the skin of American awareness. Like a festering
boil, it was about to burst onto the American scene with a full
dramatic and historic force that wiuld drag ancient prejudice and
irrational hate “Of the other” onto the light of national
consciousness. The coming national confrontation with America’s
Original Sin of the legacy of two-and-a-half-centuries of slavery and
its attendant racism was about to dominate the consciousness
of the nation during the following decades of American life. A
prescient Faulkner painted the awful reality of racial prejudice and
hatred in the form of a novel and then as a cinematic motion picture
in a very entertaining format.

Claude’s
honest and skillfully realistic interpretation and portrayal of the
character of Chick Mallison would create an unforgettable and
socially important early look at this great issue of racism never
before so openly shown on the silver screen. Next time in Part 2 of
this series, I will tell you how Clarence Brown discovered Claude and
made him the star of his first film.

James C. Johnston, an author and a retired Franklin educator, is a frequent contributor to Franklin Observer