Pollyanna (1960)

In the interest of coping with a dark time, I picked the most famously optimistic movie I could think of. OK, all I really knew about it was the reputation of the title character.

The movie deviates a little from the book's setting and doesn't indicate the state or year, but it appears to be New England in the early 1900s. Preteen Pollyanna Whittier (Hayley Mills in her Disney debut) is moderately fortunate for an orphan in that she gets to live in the mansion of her Aunt Polly Harrington (Jane Wyman), but lest you think it a dream come true, the aunt is bigger on making sure the niece acts like a lady than on loving or spoiling her. Furthermore, Polly is effectively the town matriarch, which may explain the local prevalence of bitterness and hostility. But Pollyanna has embraced her late father's insistence on looking on the bright side, and she shows it to everyone she meets.

The Yearling (1946)

The AFI Silver Theater is celebrating Gregory Peck's 100th birthday with a festival. I had already seen most of his promising features, but this one seemed worth an 11:30 AM Saturday viewing, even if my dad had better things to do.

The titular animal does not actually show up until an hour in -- unless you interpret the title to refer to main boy Jody. In late 19th-century Florida, he badly wants a pet woodland critter of some kind, but his subsistence-farming parents, especially mother Orry (Jane Wyman), forbid it. After a series of what you might call minor adventures, father Ezra, a.k.a. Penny(?!), finds it necessary to kill a doe, and Jody talks his parents into letting him adopt the fawn left behind, partly as a sort of returned favor. He dubs the fawn Flag, without appearing to realize how appropriate "Flag the Stag" would become. This being a cinematic adaptation from a book, you can guess that Jody will not get to keep Flag as long as he likes....