June Harding

(On Cable TV, July 2021) At first glance, The Trouble with Angels feels like a silly comedy featuring two teenagers taking on their nun-run Catholic school. Child star Hailey Mills (fresh from the end of her contract with Disney) pairs up with June Harding to butt wills against a Mother Superior portrayed by Rosalind Russell. Mills’s character isn’t always likable in the opening minutes of the film, multiplying trivial hijinks out of what sounds like sheer boredom and dragging her new friend along. The highlight does remain Russell, almost ideal as the reasonable voice of reason keeping the girls in line. As it happens, though, this is indicative of where the film wants to go — away from anti-establishment comedy, and into a coming-of-age drama where The Girl Learns better. I still don’t quite buy the revelation-for-the-sake-of-drama that dominates the film’s last ten minutes (you’d think that such a shift would be more gradual, and that the best friend would be aware of it), but I don’t think the film is meant to be assessed on strictly realistic terms. You can recognize in The Trouble with Angels the kind of heartwarming film meant to reaffirm traditional values, right on time for family night viewing.   It’s not bad as such — a bit conventional in the end, but clearly engineered by director Ida Lupino to be innocuous and likable.