I'll tell you why so serious

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

There is a very fine line between comedy and non comedy. I for one put it on the other side of the line. It is a sensitive coming of the age and antics of a naughty and rebellious girl Hayley Mills (Mary Clancy) with her devoted girl Friday June Harding (Rachel). Once the reason of her mental frame was known, which had been hinted, (though the hint had been telling), it explains her behavior and goes away from whatever comedy part one could assign to it. It is rather heartwarming portrayal of two generations of sensitive girls, the new (Mary) and the old (Mother superior). Another brilliant performance by evergreen Russel.

. . . THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS is a "scathingly brilliant" movie full of magic. The magic of Orphan-Hood. The magic of riding a train to boarding school. The magic of attending an academy shaped like a castle. The magic of smoking cigarettes in the Girls' Room and cigars in the cellar. The magic of an unscheduled fire drill. The magic of K.P. Duty eight days a week. The magic of forbidden hallways. The magic of bubbles. The magic of risking school expulsion. The magic of snow sifting through the dorm windows. The magic of burlesque dancing. The magic of first brassieres. The magic of the Stations of the Cross. The magic of summer vacation. The magic of school band competition. The magic of learning to swim. The magic of needlework. The magic of community service. The magic of going overseas to teach lepers. The magic of Taking the Veil. Obviously, it would be IMPOSSIBLE to cram any MORE magic than this into one movie. Who says nuns are no fun? This is the funniest nun movie Hollywood ever made until Joseph Guzman's loosely-based remake of THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS came out in 2010: for something that will REALLY knock your socks off, follow-up ANGELS by enjoying Guzman's NUDE NUNS WITH BIG GUNS!

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

The thing I liked about this movie was the chemistry between Hayley Mills and June Harding. When the movie was filmed, June was 25 and Hayley was 19. You don't see girls in films much less women have that kind of chemistry. Turn off the sound, you feel the energy between the two. Even when they aren't on the scene, you see the reactions of the nuns and the girls focusing on guess who. The director didn't want to put close actions shots of the two unless for circumstances, sentimental reasons like getting in trouble, holidays, or graduations. If they did have close moments, one would look away but never at each other to not make that certain impresario. One was passive and the other aggressive like a doctor and his assistant. The implication was that they were there for themselves and the bonding was out of necessity. Throughout the move, the viewer sense was that one was going to leave but when and how.