Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
Going potty for Pollyanna when classic came to town
”When you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will.”
That iconic line is from Walt Disney classic Pollyanna, which this year marks its 60th anniversary.
Based on the book by American author Eleanor H. Porter, published in 1913, it first hit the big screen seven years later with a silent movie version starring Mary Pickford in the title role.
By the late fifties, the popularity of the book hadn’t waned, with sales reaching more than 35,000 copies a year.
The book’s appeal for Disney was obviously congenial with the cosiness of the small-town setting and the character of Pollyanna, who brought happiness to others, qualities the studio could readily identify with.
In 1959, when Walt Disney acquired the rights to produce a major live-action production of Pollyanna, the anti-Disney critics had a field day with pre-release speculation that taking on such an enterprise promised to be a disaster; a tearjerker of a story presented by Disney, the master of schmaltz and excessive sentiment, would surely be a set-up for failure?
But such negative foreboding had a rude awakening when American critic John Canemaker echoed the unanimous opinion voiced by individual critics who had seen the finished product by saying: “The critics who went to see Pollyanna expecting a sloppily sentimental,tearjerking film were astonished to discover a beautifully acted, intelligently scripted film of genuine warmth; one of the best live-action films Disney ever made.”
Walt Disney had auditioned more than 300 girls to play the plum part of Pollyanna and among the hopefuls was Patty Duke.
When British director Ken Annakin, who was currently preparing Swiss Family Robinson for the studio, saw Hayley Mills debut in a modest British film Tiger Bay (1959) he was bowled over by her performance.
He quickly phoned Walt in America and pleaded with him not to cast the role of Pollyanna until he had seen Tiger Bay.
Annakin paid for, and air-shipped, a print of Tiger Bay to Disney, who was equally enchanted by the young Miss Mills and recognised her potential to become an international star.
The offer of a six-picture contract was mutually agreed between Disney and Hayley’s father.
And it is no coincidence that after the deal was signed, Disney offered Sir John Mills the role of the father in Swiss Family Robinson.
The cast of Pollyanna was one of the most distinguished ever assembled for a Hollywood film.
Jane Wyman ( Aunt Polly), Agnes Moorehead (Mrs Snow), Karl Malden (Reverend Ford), Nancy Alson (Nancy),
Adolphe Menjou ( M Pendergast), in his final film, Kevin Corcoran ( Jimmy Bean), Richard Egan (Dr Chilton) and Donald Crisp ( Mayor Karl Warren) were all screen veterans and made for an excellent ensemble.
The star cast for Pollyanna was unusual for a Disney picture and, more surprisingly, it marked the feature film debut of director/scenarist David Swift.
Disney also hired many behind the scenes technicians imported from other Hollywood studios especially for this picture; Pollyanna was earmarked as something special – and that’s exactly what it turned out to be.
Swift, who was best known for his work on television, once said: “It was the first time anyone took a $2 million budget chance on me; trust Disney to do it.”
Like Ernest Lehman, who wrote the screenplay for The Sound Of Music, Swift, in adapting the book for the screen, needed to tone down the sweet, saccharine element of the story.
In his autobiography, Lehman recalls: “In the book, Pollyanna was so filled with happiness that I wanted to kick her!
“Instead of making her the glad girl of the book, we simmered her cheerfulness down to merely emphasise the ‘things could be worse’ attitude.
“The cast terrified me as I was afraid they’d say, ‘TV man go home’, but they didn’t.
“It was a very happy set and everybody worked their heads off for me.”
Filming started in August 1959 on beautiful Californian locations in Santa Rosa, 50 miles from North San Francisco, Petaluma, and the Napa Valley, with interiors completed on sound stages at the Disney studio.
The young Hayley Mills was nervous and distracted on the first day of shooting the scene where she inspires Reverend Ford to look for the good in his congregation and stand up for himself.
Her father, Sir John, was present on location during a break in filming and he took Hayley to one side and said she was coming across like a big white cabbage.
He told her to pull her finger out and get on with the task at hand.
For the young star it had suddenly all become a serious business, but Hayley kept the flag flying and went on to play Pollyanna to perfection, winning a special Academy Award for her performance.
The perfectionism and tremendous detail that was the hallmark of the Disney classic animated feature films can be rediscovered in Pollyanna.
It is a visually impressive film rich in simple truths and values with three-dimensional characters and no stereotypes.
It was 1960 when I went potty over Pollyanna after it opened at the Pavilion Cinema in Airdrie; after repeated viewings (about 14!), I had memorised most of the dialogue from the movie’s key scenes.
The word spread that a nine-year-old film fanatic could quote Pollyanna and, consequently, I was invited to the home of Mrs Mitchell, who lived two doors down from my gran in Gartlea’s Hillfoot Road, to perform my act.
She kept hens in her back yard and sold eggs for four-pence each. As it turned out, when I arrived with my mum to put on the show, it was a full house of neighbours!
The end result was a crowd going mad with applause and I received a handful of money for my effort; I quickly realised that being a film buff could be financially rewarding!
Surprisingly, Pollyanna wasn’t the success that Disney had hoped for.
The classic film did earn a profit in its initial release, but it fell short of what the studio had anticipated.
Walt reasoned that the film could have performed better with a different title as women and children flocked to see it but men stayed away in their droves.
However, that disappointment was reversed in 1961 when Disney released The Parent Trap, starring not one but two Hayley Mills.
Written and directed again by David Swift, the movie was a box office sensation and established the hugely talented Mills as one of the prime assets of the Disney studio.