The Trouble with Angels

All hell breaks loose when a mischief-happy teen enters an all-girls Catholic school – run by a group of nuns wise to the ways of the world. For all the silliness and laughs, a surprisingly serious film – a true masterpiece full of surprises!

The Trouble with Angels is the odd one out in Ida Lupino’s career as a director in cinema, being the sole film she made that she didn’t produce as well; also, it came after a dozen plus years dedicated to series TV where she had become a mainstay especially for Westerns and crime; finally, it’s her only big-screen comedy, one that features lots of rebellious teenage girls, feistily wise nuns, plus merely a few specimens of the less fair sex in decidedly irrelevant roles. And yet, what looks at first like merely an afterthought could very well be the key to Lupino’s complete œuvre, with the film’s setting in an all-girls Catholic school finally offering her the opportunity to talk in a kaleidoscopic fashion about a subject dear to her: The choices faced by and offered to women – with the nuns having quite different pasts from what one might expect. For all the silliness and laughter, The Trouble with Angels is a surprisingly serious film – a true masterpiece full of surprises!

– Olaf Möller