NR | 2 h 8 min | Drama | 1946
Clarence Brown’s coming-of-age film is set in late 19th-century Florida.
The film opens with Penny Baxter (Gregory Peck) narrating why he ended up in scrub country. Following service in the Civil War, he’d sought refuge away from towns and wars and civilization and headed to the wilderness, to “the sources, the beginning of things.”
He’d intended a quiet life with his wife Orry (Jane Wyman), cultivating crops on Baxter’s Island, a patch of land amid a “rolling sea of trees.” But tragedy struck. Several of their children died, leaving them with their lone pre-teen boy, Jody (Claude Jarman Jr.)….