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The Trouble with Angels
Oct. 28th, 2018 06:47 pmI first watched The Trouble with Angels lo these many years ago, before I even had an LJ, because I loved Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and I wanted more of the same and The Trouble with Angels was the only other Rosalind Russell movie the library had.
Readers, this is the wrong reason to watch The Trouble with Angels. In His Girl Friday, Russell plays a fast-talking reporter; in The Trouble with Angels, she’s the dignified and intimidating Mother Superior of a parochial boarding school. She’s excellent in both roles - but they are very, very different roles.
So I appreciated the movie more this time around, when I went to see it in the IU cinema. Russell manages to nail her comic timing without ever sacrificing the Mother Superior’s dignity, which is quite a feat, and Hailey Mills (in her first post-Disney role) is charming as the rambunctious new student Mary Clancy. In classic boarding school fashion, Mary and her chum Rachel are forever ricocheting out of one trouble and into another, under the disapproving but occasionally amused in spite of herself eye of the Mother Superior.
(According to the speaker who introduced the film, Mills and Russell didn’t get along any better than their characters do in the movie: Mills stuck her tongue out at Russell whenever she saw her. Russell and director Ida Lupino, on the other hand, struck up a friendship immediately.)
The boarding school hijinks are delightful, the actors are charming, and the setting - the mansion and its grounds that have been bequeathed to the order for their school - is gorgeous. I was hoping that watching the movie a second time around would make the ending work for me, but alas… ( Spoilers )
So the movie bobbles a bit at the end. But not in a way that ruins the movie, I think: all the fun boarding school hijinks are still there. It just doesn’t stick its landing.
Readers, this is the wrong reason to watch The Trouble with Angels. In His Girl Friday, Russell plays a fast-talking reporter; in The Trouble with Angels, she’s the dignified and intimidating Mother Superior of a parochial boarding school. She’s excellent in both roles - but they are very, very different roles.
So I appreciated the movie more this time around, when I went to see it in the IU cinema. Russell manages to nail her comic timing without ever sacrificing the Mother Superior’s dignity, which is quite a feat, and Hailey Mills (in her first post-Disney role) is charming as the rambunctious new student Mary Clancy. In classic boarding school fashion, Mary and her chum Rachel are forever ricocheting out of one trouble and into another, under the disapproving but occasionally amused in spite of herself eye of the Mother Superior.
(According to the speaker who introduced the film, Mills and Russell didn’t get along any better than their characters do in the movie: Mills stuck her tongue out at Russell whenever she saw her. Russell and director Ida Lupino, on the other hand, struck up a friendship immediately.)
The boarding school hijinks are delightful, the actors are charming, and the setting - the mansion and its grounds that have been bequeathed to the order for their school - is gorgeous. I was hoping that watching the movie a second time around would make the ending work for me, but alas… ( Spoilers )
So the movie bobbles a bit at the end. But not in a way that ruins the movie, I think: all the fun boarding school hijinks are still there. It just doesn’t stick its landing.
