Read first, or watch first?
Order matters less here than it does with A Little Princess, where the film rewrites the ending outright. But lean book-first anyway, for a plain reason: the film's plot is a genuinely different plot. A kid who watches first will spend thirty-two chapters waiting for a bazaar, a town uprising and a fall from a window, none of which arrive; a kid who reads first gets to watch the film as a variation and enjoy spotting the seams. If it's one evening and one screen, take the 1960 Disney — two hours and eight minutes, and Swift deliberately made his Pollyanna a rounder child than Porter's, which some families will prefer and some will feel cheated by. The 1920 Mary Pickford is the one worth knowing about: fifty-eight minutes, silent, released in the last year of Porter's life, and it rents for about two dollars.