Peter Lane is a retired sea captain, living out his twilight years on a riverboat on the banks of the Mississippi River. During a brutal storm, a deathly ill woman and her young son, Buddy, arrive seeking refuge. When the mother dies, the boy becomes Peter's responsibility. He takes to carving animals from wood with his jackknife to amuse the child. The town sheriff, however, finds the poverty-stricken man an unfit father for the toddler. Buddy is brought to an orphanage, leaving Peter with a broken heart. Just as all seems lost, a big city department store learns of Peter's wooden animals and offers him a large sum of money to mass produce them. Now with fortune on his side, he hopes to find Buddy and at last make him his son...
This touching film is one of the earliest cinematic triumphs of King Vidor (1894-1982). It served as inspiration for the Baby Peggy hit Captain January (1924), which was remade in 1936 with Shirley Temple. Vidor's first feature, The Turn in the Road (1919), had only been released the year before. 1925's The Big Parade established him as one of Hollywood's preeminent directors, while his 1928 masterpiece, The Crowd, earned him the first of five Academy Award nominations. Hallelujah! (1929), Our Daily Bread (1934), Stella Dallas (1937), The Citadel (1938), Duel In The Sun (1946), The Fountainhead (1949) and War And Peace (1956) are but a few of his many highly regarded works in the sound era. Uncredited, he also directed all of the "Kansas" scenes in The Wizard of Oz (1939) including the "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" sequence. Honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame for his six decade career, Vidor won a honorary Oscar "for his incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator" in 1979.