The movies used to be more fearless when it came to breaking children’s hearts.

Films like “Bambi” and “Old Yeller” weren’t bent on protecting a child’s uncertain knowledge that the world is an impermanent place, that pets and parents and even siblings and playmates die. And once you learn that, you might be inclined to grow up a little, embrace and treasure those close to you a little more.

But that became a rare thing. A “My Girl” or “My Dog Skip” might come along every so often. But they create an uproar, as often as not, simply by being honest tearjerkers.

These days, whole websites are devoted to protecting children and adults of the arrested development variety from cinematic heartbreak. If you’ve ever visited “Doesthedogdie.com,” I hope you’re blushing.

Whatever reason our infantilized culture uses to spare the very young from unpleasant realities, what we’re really doing is sparing ourselves from that “adult” conversation, or ourselves from an adult response to life’s grim but cathartic moments.

“The Yearling” is a classic tearjerker, a coming-of-age tale set in America’s hardscrabble, survival-is-a-struggle past. It’s sentimental, but a depiction of an unforgiving place and time where just living into adulthood was not guaranteed and just surviving in a hot, insect, snake, gator and disease-ridden Florida was a struggle.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a non-native who moved to Cross Creek, Florida, to become the Sunshine State’s greatest writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for this 1930s book set in rustic “cracker” Florida of the 1870s. It’s about a critter-obsessed kid, his doting dad and lost-her-sense-of-lightness mother and their struggle to make a home in the barely-farmable, buggy/snakey center of the state, in the swampy pinelands where Rawlings came to live and write half a century later.

And yes, the title character dies. And the deer isn’t the only living thing that perishes in this story and the 1946 Technicolor classic that director Clarence Brown filmed from it.

It’s a beautiful film, poetically-scripted, tenderly directed and perfectly cast, seamlessly blending north central Florida locations (Hawthorne, Silver Springs and environs), the oft-filmed Big Bear Lake corner of Southern California and MGM soundstages to recreate a still little-settled part of the country just after the Civil War.

The archaic dialect practically requires subtitles.

“Now, tell th’truth and shame the Devil, wa’rnt that bee tree a fine excuse to go ramblin’ to?”

MGM landed young Gregory Peck for doting dad Penny Baxter, and his brooding romantic mental patient of Hitchock’s “Spellbound” disappeared in this affable, good-natured turn.

The formidable Jane Wyman plays Orry, the local gal of limited horizons Penny found when he moved south after the war spent “fightin’ the Yankees.” Orry is dour and humorless, more an authority figure than a loving mother. What the movie doesn’t tell us is that they’d had six children who didn’t survive infancy before young Jody was born.

Eleven year-old only child Jody sparkles onto the screen in the person of newcomer Claude Jarman Jr. In the almost 80 years since “The Yearling” premiered, this is still recognized as one of the great child performances, up there with Jackie Cooper in “The Champ,” Tatum O’Neal in “Paper Moon,” Anna Paquin in “The Piano” or Keke Palmer in “Akeela and the Bee.”

Penny Baxter’s carved out a subsitence farm just north of Cross Creek. They grow all that they eat, which is as much as the limited land Penny’s back and their draft horse will allow him to clear. Their livestock is constantly imperiled by the bear, Ol’ Slewfoot,” and by pig-rustling rednecks — their neighbors, the Forresters.

Jody fears his mother but idolizes his father. And at Dad’s side, over the course of a year, the boy will experience the terrors and glories of nature, the thin thread of subsistence their family lives on and the pleasures of travel — to The Forresters’ roadhouse, to “Volusia” (the county where Daytona Beach is located, and the steamboat lumber town of Deerfoot Landing/Deland, which may be where they visit).

Jody pines for a pet he can call his own. Pa’s got the dogs, which are working animals and game to fight the bear they set off to track after he slaughers their chickens. A Forrester kid, Fodderwing (Donn Gift) shows off his pet raccoon.

When Pa is bitten by a rattlesnake and kills a deer to use its internal organs to “draw out th’poison,” Jody gets his wish. The deer was a doe, and to make up for its sacrifice, Jody convinces his reluctant parents to let him take the doe’s fawn in and raise it.

Love and devotion and hard life lessons will follow as both of them grow up during Jody’s eleventh year.

Jarman lights up every scene he’s in, and Peck brings a light touch to folksy Penny, nicknamed that by the brutish, hulking Forrester (Forrest Tucker as the heavy) that he cons into swapping a “no good dawg” for a shotgun.

Henry Travers of “It’s a Wonderful Life” plays a kind-hearted storekeeper.

But the heart of the picture, almost tucked into the background, is Wyman as Orry. Like Peck, she was nominated for an Oscar for this performance. Orry tries to tell “a tale” by the fireplace, blank-faced relating a story with no moral, message or punchline. Deadpan. She makes Orry stoic and plainly fearful of investing her whole heart in this world, this life, this husband and this little boy. Any or all of them could be taken away in a heartbeat, she’s learned.

Early in my career, I worked in Knoxville, Tennessee, where director Clarence Brown attended college and endowed his alma mater with cash for a theater at the University of Tennessee, and left his papers and a long oral history interview on tape for them to archive. Writing a story about him on the 100th anniversary of his birth, I went through his papers — which included old screenplays with the letters “GG” and five digits scribbled on the margins. That was Greta Garbo’s Hollywood phone number. Brown might have been her favorite director, with the silent classic “Flesh and the Devil,” “Anna Christie,” the film where “Garbo Speaks!” among their collaborations.

In the oral history recorded during a late life commemoration in the ’60s, you can hear Brown talk about what flirty “child” Liz Taylor was when she filmed “National Velvet” with him, his reasons for the ahead-of-its-time race drama “Intruder in the Dust,” and his difficulties filming “The Yearling,” getting all those locations and sound stage sequences to fit together.

It wasn’t until a few year later, when I interviewed Gregory Peck for one of those “An Evening With” movie star tours that I got an earful of how much trouble “Yearling” was.

“It was the poor little deer,” Peck explained. Shooting in Technicolor required every light on the lot, and the fawns playing the yearling would get hot in an instant and wander off the set. You can see by the way young Jarman has to grab him and hug him and pick him up in shot after shot what the deer had in mind. ESCAPE.

“Clarence finally called over a grip and sent him off to get a block of ice,” Peck recalled. “He got that, had it covered in straw and ferns or whatever they had in the forest bed scene, and sat the fawn on that. He stayed still long enough for a couple of takes.”

“GENIUS,” Peck laughed.

A couple of years after that, I tracked down Jarman for an anniverary story about “The Yearling” and Rawlings and he confirmed that whatever the glories of his performance, his real job was” keeping the deer” content or contained enough to get a take every time the camera rolled.

The bear/dog fight scene in this movie still has the power to disturb, and whatever the American Humane Society agreed to sign off on, you have to wonder what they didn’t see or weren’t in Florida to observe in situations like that. Nothing here looks faked.

But that’s one of the reasons “The Yearling” endures. Jody’s lessons about the harsh realities of life come from nature and human nature. Learning to look at loss, accept it and embrace grief is a big part of what he learns, and what movies like this one pass on to children on those rare occasions a film has the nerve to challenge kids this way this one still does.

Your film doesn’t become a childrens’s classic and remain one by avoiding the truth, as sad as it sometimes is.

Rating: approved, animal violence, fistfights

Cast: Gregory Peck, Claude Jarman Jr., Jane Wyman, Henry Travers, Chill Wills and Forrest Tucker.

Credits: Directed by Clarence Brown, scripted by Paul Osborn and John Lee Mahin, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. An MGM release on Amazon, Tubi, Movies!, Youtube etc.

Running time: 2:08