What 1946 film starring Gregory Peck is about a boy who adopts a fawn?
Answer
The Yearling
The 1946 film starring Gregory Peck about a boy who adopts a fawn is The Yearling.
Directed by Clarence Brown for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film adapts Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s 1938 novel. Peck plays Ezra “Penny” Baxter, a Florida backwoods farmer, while Claude Jarman Jr. plays his son Jody, who adopts an orphaned fawn and names him Flag. Jane Wyman plays Jody’s mother, Ora.
The story is set in 1870s Florida and treats the deer as both a beloved companion and a practical problem. As Flag grows, his appetite and destructive behavior threaten the family’s crops, forcing Jody to confront the painful responsibilities of caring for a wild animal. That emotional conflict is why the film is more than a simple children’s adventure.
The Yearling was filmed in Technicolor and became a major MGM success. It earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor for Peck; Claude Jarman Jr. won a special Juvenile Award. It is sometimes confused with Old Yeller, another family film centered on a child and an animal, but that story concerns a dog, not a fawn.