It seems this film did poorly in the theatres; Walt was of the opinion that it was because, by 1960, “Pollyanna” was already slang for someone with a sickeningly sweet outlook on life. He figured too many people would assume the movie was pure treacle, particularly men and boys, and stay away. Actually, my four-year-old son wasn’t terribly interested in it, but he’s having a hard week for several reasons (it hadn’t occurred to him that starting kindergarten means not being in preschool anymore, and he’s upset that he won’t have the same teacher next year!), and he didn’t really have the focus to watch anything. Besides, he didn’t want to watch a movie; he wanted to make cookies.

Pollyanna Whittier (Hayley Mills) is the orphan niece of Polly Harrington (Jane Wyman), the richest and most important woman in the town of Harrington, Vermont. The Harringtons basically run everything—and Polly is the only Harrington. She’s not thrilled at taking in Pollyanna, but the child has no one else. She tucks her away in a tower room and lets the servants take care of her. Still, Pollyanna is an ingratiating child, and what she spreads is “the Glad Game,” a game she used to play with her missionary father—whenever she’s sad about something, she tries to find a thing to be glad about in it.

Pollyanna waltzes her way through a really impressive cast, making the town less pessimistic while around her, a minor revolt against her aunt takes place. Pollyanna becomes part of it half because helping with a bazaar is genuinely fun for her and half because all the people she cares about are involved in it. She spends considerably more time with Nancy Furman (Nancy Olson) than with her aunt Polly, after all, for all Nancy’s one of the maids.

Don’t recognize the name? Ah. Nancy Olson was Fred MacMurray’s love interest in The Absent-Minded Professor—and William Holden’s in Sunset Boulevard. Jane Wyman, of course, had a long and successful career regardless of having been married to Ronald Reagan. The two cantankerous people to whom Pollyanna brings joy are played by Agnes Moorehead and Adolphe Menjou (in his final film, no less). The minister is Karl Malden. The mayor is Donald Crisp, whose career went back to the silent days and who also connects to Ronald Reagan by way of Knute Rockne All American. Almost the entire credited cast is someone of note; there’s even Kevin Corcoran as chipper orphan Jimmy Bean.

But despite having not one but two chipper orphans, I would honestly say that the movie isn’t as saccharine as its reputation. For one thing, not everyone cares about Pollyanna’s game. Upstairs maid Angelica (Mary Grace Canfield of Green Acres) rolls her eyes until about the last minute and a half—as does Aunt Polly. It’s not every children’s movie, either, that features a scene with a character picking out her coffin. Indeed, in that scene, Pollyanna outright loses her temper, and she never apologizes for it, either. She is as tired as everyone else of listening to Mrs. Snow (Moorehead) whining on and on about how she’s dying. Especially since she isn’t.

There is also, quite frankly, a little healthy sex, or at least lust. Nancy is engaged to George Dodds (James Drury), or anyway engaged to be engaged. He kisses her almost every time he sees her. Aunt Polly’s not thrilled, but the implication is that she dislikes it because she quarreled with her own boyfriend, Dr. Edmond Chilton (Richard Egan, who costarred with Drury—and Elvis—in Love Me Tender), and resents that Nancy is having a better life and is more likely to get married. Also, you know, it’s the turn of the last century, and your maid making out in your summer house in sight of God and everyone is a little unseemly.

And, yes, there’s the revolt. “This should be a town, not a dynasty,” a character says at one point. As long as Polly Harrington controls the newspaper, the government, and the pulpit, doing anything she opposes is nearly impossible, and the whole town knows it. But children are being mistreated, so they will gather together to help the children even if she thinks everything is fine. (I’d note, IMDb goofs page, that obviously the girls are supposed to be the original US flag, so it’s not a goof that it only has thirteen stars.) I suspect Aunt Polly won’t have as much sway on the government, either.

This wasn’t the first movie Hayley Mills made, though it was the first for Disney and the first without her father. (I maintain her first movie should count no more than Sofia Coppola’s first role; Hayley was “Infant” in her father John’s So Well Remembered.) It turns out that Lillian went to the movies once with Virginia Anderson, wife of Disney studio head Bill. The women saw Tiger Bay, the only actually acting Hayley did before Pollyanna, and they decided she would be perfect for the role. Their husbands wouldn’t listen to them despite the fact that 362 girls had already been considered and rejected for the role; you’d figure auditioning one more wouldn’t hurt. But they finally at least watched the movie. This and five other Disney movies, and probably Hayley’s whole career, was the result.

The weirdest part of my personal association with Pollyanna, however, is that for pretty much my entire childhood, I mentally coded Ben Tarbell, one of the more prominent characters, as black. Light-skinned, to be sure, but black all the same. Never mind that he was a prominent citizen. Never mind that he was married to a white woman (Anne Seymour). In my head, he was a black guy—I suspect because, to my LA trained eyes, a town without a black guy was just weird. (I’ve only read the book once, but I seem to recall that of course it’s the servants who could be read as black, if anyone.) As it happens, Ben Tarbell is played by Edward Platt, probably best known as the Chief from Get Smart. What was my child self thinking?

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