(2 of 2)
The picture, with a few minor exceptions, sticks to the story like icing to a sugar bun. Pollyanna (Hayley Mills) is a poor little orphan girl, the eleven-year-old daughter of a kindly, idealistic clergyman who has "gone to heaven to be with mother" and left her in the British West Indies without "anybody but the Ladies Aid" and her Aunt Polly (Wyman), a middle-aged puckerpuss who lives all alone in a vast Victorian mansion somewhere east of the Mississippi and does good to her fellow townsfolk whether they like it or not. When Aunt Polly hears of her brother-in-law's death, she sets her thin lips and grimly agrees to take the girl in. "I know my duty . . . disagreeable as the task [will] be."
Polly arrives—a touching sight. Dressed in pitiful scraps "from the missionary barrel," she looks like a poor little match girl down to her last match. But underneath her rags she wears an impenetrable armor of cheerfulness that shines like pure rock candy. When Aunt Polly indifferently sends a maidservant (Olson) to meet her at the train. Pollyanna gurgles to the girl: "I'm glad . . . because now I've got her still coming, and I've got you besides!" When Aunt Polly coldly stows her away in a bare little bedroom in the attic, she runs to the window, takes in the view and simpers: "Oh. I'm so glad she let me have this room!" She's not really glad, she hastens to explain. She's just playing a game her father taught her, "the glad game." Object of the game: to find the silver lining in every cloud, the gold tooth in every shark. And Pollyanna plays the game with such a monstrous power of positive thinking that after two hours and 14 minutes under that relentless little ray of sunshine, the whole town she lives in is dissolved into a mile-wide meringue of mawkishness. At a big charity bazaar, they all sing America the Beautiful, and later somebody bursts out sobbing: "Just think! If she had never come to this town! We ought to get down on our knees and thank God for sending her!"
Millions of moviegoers will undoubtedly feel the same, but it would possibly be sufficient to thank Disney. With the mechanical bugs at last chased out of Disneyland, he has taken time to mount a period production that, from antimacassars to zinnias, is approximately perfect.
His director, David Swift, has made the most of a cast that includes some of the most skillful muggers now in the movies. But chief credit for the film's success belongs to 13-year-old Hayley Mills, the youngest member of what may at the moment be the most successful family in show business.* With her grace, intelligence and unstagy freshness, she has made the horrid little prig she plays seem almost as nice as the authoress intended her to be.
* Hayley's father, John Mills, is a well-known British cinemactor (Great Expectations, Tiger Bay); her mother, Mary Hayley Bell, is a successful British playwright (Men in Shadow, Duct for Two Hands); her 18-year-old sister, Juliet, is now playing on Broadway in Five Finger Exercise.