During the first half of the sixties Hayley Mills was perhaps the most successful teenage actress in Hollywood, appearing in a series of family comedies for Walt Disney. "The Trouble with Angels" was the first movie she made after her contract with Disney came to an end in 1965, and although Hayley was now twenty years old she was still cast as a teenage schoolgirl. The film is set in an all-girls Catholic boarding school run by an order of nuns. Hayley plays the rebellious Mary Clancy who with her best friend Rachel Devery gets into all sorts of scrapes and becomes the bane of the Mother Superior's life. Although Hayley's own schooldays were now at an end, she was still young enough to be convincing as a teenager. Not so June Harding, who plays Rachel and was actually twenty-six at the time, three years older than Camilla Sparv, who plays one of the nuns, Sister Constance. Unlike Mills, who is her usual irrepressible self, Harding gives a wooden performance.
Although the movie was made in the sixties, the heyday of protest and youthful rebellion, the misdemeanours of the two girls are very minor-league stuff. The general atmosphere is similar to that of those old boarding school novels from the thirties by the likes of Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil; all that is missing is a midnight feast with lashings of ginger beer. I kept hoping that Mary and Rachel would do something really daring, like taking drugs, sneaking boys back into their dormitory, going on a protest march calling for the Pill to be distributed free, having a lesbian affair or spiking the nuns' coffee with LSD, but their minor acts of rebellion never get much further than bilking off swimming lessons by feigning illness or sneaking off for a quick cigarette. The scene in which Mary substitutes soap powder for the nuns' sugar is about as much fun as it gets. Hayley Mills obviously wanted to keep her clean-cut image intact, although that image was to be damaged in her next film, "Sky West and Crooked", in which she plays a simple-minded girl who gets involved with an older man, and to be blown out of the water in the film after that, "The Family Way", in which she appeared nude.
For most of its length "The Trouble with Angels" is a rather dull comedy about naughty schoolgirls, but it tries to become more serious at the end when Mary, rather improbably, decides that she too will become a nun. Mary seems to have been impressed by Sister Constance who is leaving the school to teach in a leper colony in the Philippines, and by the Mother Superior's own life history- she gave up a successful career as a fashion designer to become a nun- but there has been little in what has gone before to suggest that Mary might have a religious vocation, and this ending comes as something of a surprise. If the film-makers had wanted to make a film about a girl who becomes a nun- a sort of junior version of "The Nun's Story"- they would have done better to concentrate more on her spiritual development from the start. As it is, I was left with the impression that they simply tacked this unlikely ending onto this feeble comedy just to reassure Catholic cinema-goers that their faith was not being lampooned. 4/10
Although the movie was made in the sixties, the heyday of protest and youthful rebellion, the misdemeanours of the two girls are very minor-league stuff. The general atmosphere is similar to that of those old boarding school novels from the thirties by the likes of Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil; all that is missing is a midnight feast with lashings of ginger beer. I kept hoping that Mary and Rachel would do something really daring, like taking drugs, sneaking boys back into their dormitory, going on a protest march calling for the Pill to be distributed free, having a lesbian affair or spiking the nuns' coffee with LSD, but their minor acts of rebellion never get much further than bilking off swimming lessons by feigning illness or sneaking off for a quick cigarette. The scene in which Mary substitutes soap powder for the nuns' sugar is about as much fun as it gets. Hayley Mills obviously wanted to keep her clean-cut image intact, although that image was to be damaged in her next film, "Sky West and Crooked", in which she plays a simple-minded girl who gets involved with an older man, and to be blown out of the water in the film after that, "The Family Way", in which she appeared nude.
For most of its length "The Trouble with Angels" is a rather dull comedy about naughty schoolgirls, but it tries to become more serious at the end when Mary, rather improbably, decides that she too will become a nun. Mary seems to have been impressed by Sister Constance who is leaving the school to teach in a leper colony in the Philippines, and by the Mother Superior's own life history- she gave up a successful career as a fashion designer to become a nun- but there has been little in what has gone before to suggest that Mary might have a religious vocation, and this ending comes as something of a surprise. If the film-makers had wanted to make a film about a girl who becomes a nun- a sort of junior version of "The Nun's Story"- they would have done better to concentrate more on her spiritual development from the start. As it is, I was left with the impression that they simply tacked this unlikely ending onto this feeble comedy just to reassure Catholic cinema-goers that their faith was not being lampooned. 4/10