By Loné Beasley
CNHI News Service

It seems to me there are certain movies it should be a crime not to see. For my money, everyone should watch “Pollyanna,” the 1960 release featuring Haley Mills as a young orphaned missionary couple’s daughter who goes to live with her wealthy Aunt Polly.

It and the book it’s based on are where we get the word “Pollyannaish,” a term people use to belittle someone they consider to be “absurdly optimistic and good hearted, believing in a good world where everything works out for the best all the time,” to quote the Urban Dictionary.

“The term is often (used) in combination with being God-fearing and perceiving oneself standing on a higher moral ground than others,” the dictionary continues.

Not to pick on the Urban Dictionary folks, but in my mind, this is a bad definition fostered by someone who apparently didn’t see the same movie I did. Speaking of which, occasionally Pollyanna comes up in conversation and it is always surprising to find a number of people have never even heard of it.

This would have seemed a sacrilege to me when I was nine, when all us neighborhood kids went to watch it on the big screen. My young heart fell pitter-patter head over heels in love with Haley Mills, at least for a few days until something else grabbed my fickle attention.

These many years later it is still worth watching. It is a classic that takes us back to a time when things were simpler and slower. And yes, Pollyanna is nearly boundlessly sunny, but hers is an optimism born of great pain. And besides, it’s her deceased missionary father she most often
credits with her attitude toward life.

One expression of her positive outlook is the “Glad Game” in which she consistently looks for something good in unfortunate situations. And, to be honest, I sometimes mock the Glad Game myself by employing a bad British accent (Haley’s was real) while trying to look on the bright side of a bad
situation. But her game is a great illustration of how we should handle
negative events in our lives.

One of Aunt Polly’s servants grumpily challenges her on the Glad Game and asks how she came up with it. Pollyanna credits her father, explaining that one day a barrel of donated items arrived at her family’s remote missionary outpost.

Pollyanna had asked for a doll, but instead the gift barrel contained a pair of crutches. “I was terribly disappointed, so father said we should play the Glad Game,” Polly explains.

“How could you possibly be happy to have gotten crutches?” the servant asks, sour-faced.

“Well, father said we could be glad we didn’t have to use them!”

As Abraham Lincoln said, “People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” If anything, this is more true today than when he said it.

Then again, maybe I’m just being Pollyannaish.

So be it. It’s more fun this way than the other way.

Loné Beasley writes for the Ada (Okla.) Evening News. CNHI News Service distributes his column. He can be reached at lbeasley@cnhi.com.