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Clip description
Smiley (Keith Calvert) takes two cages of bees to Granny McKinley (Sybil Thorndike) to help with her 'rheumatics’. He is terrified, because she is reputed to be the town witch, with a stash of gold to protect. He finds instead a lonely old woman in pain. A friendship begins.
Curator’s notes
Sybil Thorndike was a legend of the English stage, a Dame of the British Empire since 1931. She had played many major roles in film, although her film career never attained the heights she reached on the stage. By 1957, when Smiley Gets a Gun was filmed, she was about 75, but still very active in film. Even so, it’s an odd role for her to have accepted, given her prominence and the distance she would have had to come to play it. She is memorable in the role, although the performance is perhaps a little large – more like a pantomime dame than a small town’s eccentric elder citizen.
The first film offered Smiley a genial role model in the country parson played by Ralph Richardson. Thorndike was brought in from Britain to add the comic star power that Richardson brought to the original, but in a much less interesting part. Thorndike’s character is meant to provide something similar in terms of comedy, except that Granny McKinley isn’t all that funny. Nor does she impart much wisdom to the boy, ranting on about her gold and her bees. That absence of a real moral centre in the second film may be one of the reasons it was less successful.
