THE STRIPPER 1963

This forgotten little film has long been a favorite of mine and used to show up fairly regularly on late-night television when I was a kid. Until it resurfaced recently on YouTube, I can say it’s easily been 40 years since I last saw this last-gasp effort in Hollywood’s love affair with the works of Faulkner, O’Neill, Williams, & Inge.  

Adapted by Meade Roberts (The Fugitive Kind, Summer & Smoke) from William Inge’s little-known 1959 play A Loss of Roses, and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (Patton, The Planet of the Apes, Sphinx); The Stripper is, like a great many of my favorite films from the '50s—especially those written in the Southern Gothic/Midwest Melodrama tradition—a heavy slice of mordant Americana served up with plenty of lost illusions and broken dreams on the side.

Joanne Woodward as Lila Green

Richard Beymer as Kenny Baird

Claire Trevor as Helen Baird

Robert Webber as Ricky Powers

Shot in somber black and white (then de rigueur for contemplatively downbeat movies), The Stripper is the so-familiar-you’ll-swear-you’ve-seen-it-before story of Lila Green (Woodward); a down-on-her-luck wannabe actress touring with a seedy theatrical troupe (The Great Renaldo & Madame Olga: Magic & Mirth Par Excellence). Abandoned mid-tour in a small Kansas town by her equally seedy boyfriend Ricky (Webber), Lila is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. Not literal strangers, mind you, for this just happens to be the town where Lila grew up before a Betty Grable look-alike contest provided her with a second-class means of escape to Hollywood. No, the strangers Lila seeks out are merely friends from her past. Friends to whom Lila now appears as gaudy and out of place as a fur coat in July.

Kenny Thinks Lila Is Hot
And indeed, she is, for it's mid-summer in Kansas and Lila flounces about in a leopard fur coat.
Before settling on the grossly misleading The Stripper, other titles considered for this screen adaptation of A Loss of Roses were: Celebration, Woman of Summer, and A Woman in July

Lila secures temporary lodgings with Helen Baird (Trevor), a widow for whom she once babysat in her youth. Helen, now a full-time nurse pulling swing shift as a fault-finding, overprotective mother-hen to her only son Kenny (Beymer). Helen is initially glad to be of assistance to the prodigal cooch dancer, but she begins to doubt the soundness of her philanthropy when it becomes clear that the restless son she has such high hopes for has developed a major infatuation for the glamorous, at least ten-years-older new tenant in stretch pants.

Much in the same way the arrival of a train-hopping drifter shook up the small-town residents in William Inge’s Picnic, the emotional (and sexual) disruption instigated by the intrusion of Lila—a peroxided, emotionally-wounded, aging starlet with a squalid past and a childlike disposition—into the vaguely oedipal Baird household is the source of The Stripper’s central conflict.

For Lila, the return to the birthplace of so many of her unrealized dreams rekindles a desire to reclaim her lost innocence. For Kenny, irresolute in his manhood over failing to fill the idealized shoes of his late father; Lila’s age and superficially worldly charms are like a beacon of maturity. Helen, conflicted in wanting Kenny to grow up and stand on his own two feet, yet prone to clingy exclamations like "You're all I have to live for!" grows concerned when Kenny's intensifying infatuation with Lila turns to mutual attraction. 
Adding fuel to Helen's anxiety that Lila's bad influence will hasten her son's inevitable departure is the simultaneous concern that the flashy older woman will corrupt Kenny's interest in pretty Miriam Caswell (Carol Lynley), their "good girl" (aka, virginal) neighbor. In this environment, everyone seems to be looking to someone else for salvation, rescue, liberation, or redemption.

Carol Lynley as Miriam Caswell

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Stripper is something of a “Best of” collection of what had become, by 1963, the over-familiar clichés in the Tennessee Williams/William Inge oeuvre (it was Williams’ The Glass Menagerie which inspired Inge to write his first play). Set in the fictional small town of Salinson, Kansas (the same town Kansas-born William Inge chose for his play, Picnic), The Stripper has it all: the emotionally fragile fallen woman; familial discord; small-town provincialism; sexual restlessness; Freudian psychology; and the eternal battle between idealism and truth. And, of course, heat and summer used as metaphors for passion.

Seeing the film again after so many years, it’s so clear to me why I was all over this genre when I was young. First, they were situationally accessible to my limited frame of knowledge and experience. Unlike James Bond movies which took place all over the world, or exotic action adventures featuring acts of derring-do and non-stop danger; these films took place in the familiar, low-tech settings of town and neighborhood. The drama was often operatically over-the-top, yet human-scale enough in that it concerned itself with relationships, family tensions, and the applicable-at-any-age struggle with how our character flaws work to keep happiness at bay. 

Legendary real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee as Madam Olga St. Valentine
Louis Nye as Ronnie "The Great Renaldo" Cavendish

On the more “entertaining” side, not only were these films “daring” and “sex-obsessed” in ways suitable to a young person’s comprehension level (aka, all talk and no action), but the main characters were invariably women who could just as well have been gay men. Overwrought, theatrically histrionic gay men. I of course wasn’t aware of it then, but due to the times, Williams and Inge (both closeted gay playwrights during a time when homosexuality was criminalized in most states) were only able to express their truth through their female characters. Thus, their female protagonists were often imbued with a depth and dimensionality lacking in most roles for women written during this period.

As a youngster, the stoic, heteronormative macho leading man never spoke to any reality I knew. But I did recognize parts of myself in the bruised, vulnerable, idealistic outsiders Inge and Williams wrote so empathetically about.

Dreamers
Lila shows Kenny her prized possession: Film clips of her failed Hollywood screen test
 for the 1955 Fred Astaire musical Daddy Long Legs

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As much as I enjoy this film, I’m inclined to agree when I encounter reviews labeling this movie “lesser Inge.” The Stripper has a lack of subtlety and obviousness of intent that made me think it was early William Inge (it's a little like an episode from one of those '60s anthology TV programs like Playhouse 90). In reality, it’s one of Inge's late-career career misfires. One of the playwright’s first Broadway flops following a string of unbroken successes starting with Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1945), Come Back Little Sheba (1950), Picnic (1953), and Bus Stop (1955). 

Indeed, as A Loss of Roses signaled the beginning of a reversal trend in Inge’s career, the problematic play has a legacy of misfortune surrounding it rivaling that of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Michael J. Pollard as Geoffrey "Jelly" Beamis
Pollard and Webber are the only members of the original Broadway cast to recreate their roles in the film

The first victim was Shirley Booth, who had previously won both a Tony and an Oscar for her work in Inge’s Come Back Little Sheba, and accepted the role in A Loss of Roses when promised the character of Helen would be made more prominent. Alas, Booth wound up quitting the show just days before its Broadway debut for the rumored reason that Inge was shifting the production to favor a Broadway neophyte he had developed a crush on: an actor by the name of Warren Beatty, making his Broadway debut.

The second victim was William Inge himself. For although he had faith in the play and expressed the belief that A Loss of Roses was a “sure thing,” the play opened to disastrous reviews and closed after a mere 25 performances. It was Inge’s first flop, and one that so devastated him, he never had another stage success again.

The third victim was Warren Beatty. For although his performance in the play garnered a Tony Award nomination, the experience was so unpleasant, it is said to be the reason he has never appeared onstage again. On the plus side, Inge's enduring crush on Beatty (when Jane Fonda met Beatty for the first time in New York, she thought he was Inge's boyfriend) gave the young actor a foot-up in Hollywood. He made his film debut in Inge's Splendor in the Grass, and starred in the Inge-penned All Fall Down, a 1962 film with an older woman/younger man theme similar to The Stripper.

Victim number four was 20^th Century Fox production head, Buddy Adler, who, on the strength of Inge's reputation and track record, purchased the rights to A Loss of Roses for a whopping $400,000 (in 1950s dollars, yet!) before it even opened on Broadway. As he told columnist Louella Parsons at the time: “Yes, we paid a big price, but Inge writes only hits. He wrote 'Bus Stop,' 'Picnic,' and 'Dark at the Top of the Stairs.' There were a number of producers trying to get 'A Loss of Roses' so we were lucky to get it.” 

Something's Gotta Give
As she strips, Lila sings the 1954 Johnny Mercer song Fred Astaire introduced in Daddy Long Legs--the movie she unsuccessfully screen-tested for. Ironically, the song is also the title (grammatically cleaned up as Something's Got to Give) of Marilyn Monroe's last film. The Stripper was released a year after Monroe's death in August of 1962, and the movie is loaded with reminders of its originally being a Monroe vehicle.

Victim number five was Fox Studios. Adler purchased A Loss of Roses for then-under contract Marilyn Monroe, and teen heartthrob Pat Boone (!). Both turned the film down. Monroe (who enjoyed great success with the film version of Inge’s Bus Stop in 1956) likely found the Lila character - a stripper with lousy taste in men, who at one time tried to kill herself and was institutionalized - a tad too close to home; while Boone objected on moral grounds, finding the illicit affair between the young man and slightly pathetic stripper all wrong for his image.

Victim number six was actor Richard Beymer. Boosted to leading man stardom after West Side Story (1961), The Stripper jinx apparently hit a bullseye, for this was his last major motion picture.

Finally, victim number 7, Joanne Woodward. An Academy Award winner for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Woodward retired from the screen not long after marrying Paul Newman and having two children. The Stripper was to be her comeback vehicle, but its DOA performance at the boxoffice got her career reemergence off to a rocky start from which it never fully recovered.

Helen Interprets Kenny's Birthday Gift as a Gesture to Replace his Father
A great many of the unhealthier aspects of the mother-son relationship in
A Loss of Roses were excised when it became The Stripper

PERFORMANCES

While many found fault with Inge’s original play and Meade Roberts' considerably less sordid adaptation, critics were largely in agreement over the quality of Joanne Woodward’s performance. Overcoming a stiff, blonde, cotton candy wig that always appears to hover at least an inch above her scalp, Woodward has some really remarkable moments playing a character who’s part Blanche DuBois and part Charity Hope Valentine.

Looking pretty spectacular in her Travilla wardrobe (Monroe’s designer), Woodward occasionally falls prey to the gimmicky tricks of smart actors trying to play dumb (laying it on a bit thick). But she truly shines in the film’s final scenes and achieves several moments of heartrending poignancy.

"I want my roses back."
Promotional stills of several sequences not in the film suggest the already problematic storyline
of The Stripper underwent a significant amount of post-production editing.
Below, a segment of an 1891 Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the film: 

I’m nobody! Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

Then there’s a pair of us - don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know.

The rest of the cast is solid, if perhaps let down a bit by a script that doesn't offer supporting characters much beyond making a quick superficial impression. Richard Beymer is good as the juvenile, but never succeeds in getting me to understand Kenny's darker, brooding side. The always-welcome Claire Trevor is a standout as the mother who fills an empty life with overconcern for her nearly-adult son.
Carol Lynley doesn't get much of a chance to be anything but gorgeous in a thankless "girlfriend" role, and there really is far too little of the quirky Michael J. Pollard and the Auntie Mame-ish Gypsy Rose Lee. TV stalwart Robert Webber is convincingly oily.

In spite of the film's sensationalist title, Woodward makes for a very covered-up stripper.
Happily, the same can't be said for her co-star

THE STUFF OF FANTASY 

In all these years I have never forgotten The Stripper's opening, pre-title sequence. It's just that terrific. It promises a level of camp sleaze the movie never delivers, but how can you lose with a movie that opens with a shot of the original, iconic Myra Breckinridge showgirl billboard?

Bus Driver: "We are approaching the world-famous Sunset Strip. Here you will see in the flesh the great names of show business you've only watched on the screen before." 

Tourist #1: "Look! There's Jayne Mansfield!"
Tourist #2: "No it isn't, it's Kim Novak!"

Bus Driver: "No it isn't, lady."
Tourist #1: "Then who is it?"

Bus Driver: "Nobody."

BONUS MATERIAL
"The Stripper" Watch the complete film on YouTube. HERE

The Stripper's sole Oscar nomination was for the costume designs of William Travilla (Valley of the Dolls, Black Widow, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). 

"It's what I want more than anything. More than winning contests or being a movie star,
or anything like that. 'Cause if you know you've got one person who loves and respects you,
then you don't need love from a lot of people, do you?"

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2015

THE TROUBLE WITH ANGELS 1966

I grew up in the '60s, the era of the "fun nun."

And while it's true I attended Catholic schools almost exclusively during my youth, the real-life nuns I encountered daily bore more of a resemblance to Jessica Lange's steely Sister Jude in American Horror Story: Asylum than all those spunky, irrepressible, exhaustingly adorable nuns that littered the pop-cultural landscape in the wake of the '60s reconfiguration of the Catholic Church and Vatican II.

Nuns were everywhere. In 1963, Sister Luc-Gabrielle (The Singing Nun) and her ecumenical earworm of a pop ditty Dominique topped the charts, actually outselling The Beatles. In 1965, Julie Andrews and those Nazi-thwarting nuns of The Sound of Music broke boxoffice records in movie theaters nationwide. The aforementioned Sister Luc had her life story Hollywoodized in 1966's The Singing Nun, which had perky Debbie Reynolds playing standard-issue perky Debbie Reynolds, only this time, in a wimple. Moving on to groovier, more socially relevant pastures, Mary Tyler Moore played a toothsome, inner-city nun romanced by Elvis Presley (of all people) in his last film, Change of Habit (1969). But perhaps the ultimate nadir and apogee of the entire '60s "Nuns can be fun!" mania, has to be the sitcom that launched a thousand Johnny Carson punchlines: Sally Field as The Flying Nun (1967-1970)—a credit took the talented actress an entire career, three Emmys, and two Oscars to live down.

Rosalind Russell as Mother Superior (Madeline Rouche)

Hayley Mills as Mary Clancy

June Harding as Rachel Devery

When I was young, nuns onscreen seemed like near-mythic figures of virtue, wisdom, and heroism on par with cowboys in white hats and combat soldiers at the front. The embodiment of Christian values in human form, they were untouchable (and, all-importantly, untouched) and representative of all the noble (aka, maternal) female virtues. But as I grew older, the long-suffering, queenly brand of nuns portrayed in movies like The Bells of Saint Mary's (1945), Come to the Stable (1949), and The Nun's Story (1959) struck me as just another variation of the self-sacrificing "grand lady" stereotype.

Come the 1960s, when overt displays of religious piety began to be viewed as corny and old-fashioned by the moviegoing populace, nuns became overnight comic foils. Much in the way that viewers today never cease to find amusement in little old ladies engaging in comically inappropriate behavior like swearing, sexual rapaciousness, or rapping (kill me now); nuns became the go-to images of charmingly comic inappropriateness. Anti-establishment humor, so popular at the time, relied on clearly defined standards of decency to offend. So in the mid-'60s, nuns—those walking anachronisms of starchy morality—played Margaret Dumont to a world of counterculture Grouchos.

Tolerance Tested 
Reverend Mother falls victim to the old bubble-bath-in-the-sugar-bowl trick 

To avoid the appearance of mocking Catholicism, these films took the stance that their lighthearted ribbing actually contributed to "humanizing" nuns—not a bad idea, as nuns can be pretty terrifying. To mute the impression that Catholicism itself was being mocked by outsiders, these movies tended to place the antagonist "in-house." By that, I mean the standard set-up was always very similar to that of your basic opposites-attract buddy film: a high-spirited, independent-minded novice (how does one solve a problem like Maria?) butts heads with a staunch defender of the old Catholic order. Old-order Catholicism, in these instances, is represented by the imposing figure of a Mother Superior: your typical imperious disciplinarian, wet-blanket authority figure, and parental surrogate.

Thanks to oversaturation, it didn't take long for the whole wacky nuns sub-genre to fall into a series of overworked, sitcom-y tropes (nuns on scooters, nuns in brawls, nuns in discothèques). But in 1966, director Ida Lupino made what is perhaps the best film to come out of the whole "fun nuns" genre: the delightful The Trouble with Angels. One of the funniest and most egregiously overlooked comedies of the 1960s. 

Fleur de Lis & Kim Novak meet The Dragon

Set in fictional St. Francis Academy, a conservative Catholic boarding school for girls in Philadelphia, The Trouble with Angels chronicles (in seriocomic vignettes) the misadventures of rebellious, headstrong Mary Clancy (Mills) and her bumbling partner-in-crime Rachel Devery (Harding), as their mischievous antics provoke the mounting consternation and ire of the school's formidable Mother Superior (Russell).

Marge Redmond as Sister Ligouri, Russell as Mother Superior,
and Binnie Barnes as Sister Celestine

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
As I've expressed in previous posts, so-called "family films" held very little interest for me as a kid. It's not that I thought they were beneath me (I did); it's just that I found most of the 1966 options in inoffensive family entertainment to be pretty offensive. On the one hand, there was the "wholesome smut" genre of ragingly sexist sex comedies typified by Bob Hope's Boy Did I Get The Wrong Number and Jerry Lewis in Way…Way Out. Then there were the live-action Disney films, which, when not engaged in music or magic, were so patently plastic and artificial (The Monkey's Uncle, That Darn Cat!) that they were like images beamed in from another planet.
Given that my older sister attended an all-girls Catholic school and was a huge Rosalind Russell fan, there was never any question about whether or not I was going to see The Trouble with Angels when it came out, merely when. (My sister turned me into a Russell Rooter by always insisting I watch Gypsy and Auntie Mame when they aired on TV, and by frequently pointing out how much Tony Curtis resembled her in Some Like It Hot.) Besides, like many '60s-era little boys and girls, I harbored a mad (secret) crush on Hayley Mills.

Mary Clancy, on the verge of a "Scathingly brilliant idea"

When it came to finally seeing The Trouble with Angels, I'll admit my expectations weren't very high. But from the minute I saw the pre-credits sequence featuring an animated Haley Mills (complete with wings and halo) mischievously blowing out the torch of the Columbia Pictures lady, The Trouble with Angels had me in its pocket.
Part insubordinate teen comedy, part sensitive coming-of-age film; part female buddy picture, part generation-gap farce (crossed with a bit of Sunday School theology); The Trouble with Angels is a family movie miracle. Certainly, divine intervention is at least one explanation for the phenomenon of a movie not exactly treading new comedy ground yet feeling so refreshingly original.
Of course, the most obvious miracle worker is trailblazing actress/writer/director Ida Lupino, who was directing her first film since the 1953 film noir The Bigamist. Lupino handles both comedy and drama with real aplomb and gets engaging performances from her talented cast of seasoned performers and newcomers (June Harding, who receives an "introducing" credit, is especially good). 

Girl Power
A true Hollywood rarity, The Trouble with Angels is a major motion picture directed by a woman (Lupino),  written by a woman (screenplay by Blanche Hanalis from Janet Trahey's 1962 memoir, Life with Mother Superior), and focusing on the lives of an almost exclusively female cast. In the screencap above is classic character actress Mary Wickes as Sister Clarissa. Wickes reprised her role for the 1968 sequel Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, and, 26 years later, dusted off her nun habit again to appear in both Whoopi Goldberg Sister Act movies.

Lupino's deft touch is in evidence in the seamless manner in which the episodic sequences are tied together with clever connecting devices (for example, the departure and triumphant return of the school band is a great bit of visual shorthand) and in the largely silent scenes conveying the maturation of the Mary Clancy character. Best of all, Lupino manages all this without resorting to cloying sentimentality, mean-spiritedness, vulgarity, or the kind of over-the-top slapstick that bogged down the 1968 sequel, Where Angels Go…Trouble Follows.

Madame Rose & Her Daughter, Gypsy
Rosalind Russell famously portrayed the mother of stripper/author/talk show hostess Gypsy Rose Lee in the eponymous 1962 musical. The Trouble with Angels brings mother and daughter together again (for the first time) as Miss Gypsy herself  portrays Mrs. Mabel Dowling Phipps, interpretive dance instructor

PERFORMANCES

The Trouble with Angels' original title (changed sometime during production) was the far less whimsical-sounding Mother Superior. Well, the title may have been changed, but there's no denying that the film's comedic, dramatic, and emotional focus remains with the character embodied by the actress who's the film's greatest asset and most valuable player: Rosalind Russell. Whether getting laughs for her pricelessly droll delivery of simple lines like "Where's the fire?" or adding unexpected layers of emotional poignancy to scenes providing brief glimpses of the woman behind the nun's habit, Rosalind Russell gives an extraordinarily layered, subdued performance. No Sylvia Fowler (The Women), Auntie Mame, or Mama Rose flamboyance here. Russell downplays beautifully and conveys volumes with those expressive eyes of hers and through peerless vocal inflections.

After appearing to the students to be coolly unmoved by the loss of a friend, in private, Mother Superior gives vent to her complete anguish. Russell's performance in this scene alone single-highhandedly raises The Trouble with Angels far above the usual family film fare

The Trouble with Angels is well-cast and well-acted throughout. Marge Redmond as Sister Ligouri, the mathematics teacher who sounds like a race track bookie, is very good in a role similar to that which she played for three years on The Flying Nun. Former Disney star Hayley Mills (then, 19 years old) and co-star June Harding (25) display a winning and relaxed rapport and make for a likable contrasting duo of troublemakers. Both are real charmers from the word go, and every moment they share onscreen is a delight. Mills, soon to graduate on to more aggressively adult roles (with nudity, yet!) is just excellent. Her performance gets better with each viewing. Before movies became a total boys' club in the '70s, for a brief time in the '60s there seemed to be a small surge in movies that placed the friendships of teenage girls at their center: The World of Henry Orient (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965) are two of my favorites.

June Harding never made another movie after The Trouble with Angels, and at age 25 it's not likely she could have ridden that teen train for much longer. But I always thought she would have made a wonderful Emmy Lou in a film adaptation of the Bobby Sox comic strip by Marty Links

Jim Hutton makes an unbilled cameo as Mr. Petrie ("Sort of like Jack Lemmon, only younger."), the headmaster of the progressive New Trends High School 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
One of the more impressive things about The Trouble with Angels is how beautifully (and effortlessly) it balances scenes of broad comedy and gentle humor while still allowing for sequences that are surprisingly touching in their humanity and compassion. Here are a few of my favorite scenes. No matter how many times I see them, the comedic ones make me laugh, the dramatic ones get the ol' waterworks going:

COMEDY:  Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

DRAMA: "I Found Something Better"

COMEDY: Shopping for "Binders" 

DRAMA: The Christmas Visitors (dam-bursting waterworks scene)

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
The Trouble with Angels was a boxoffice success when released and is well-liked and remembered with great affection by many who saw it as youngsters. Yet it remains one of those movies which seem to have somehow fallen through the cracks over the years. It's not exactly forgotten (while available on DVD, the only time you can see it in widescreen is when it screens on TCM), but it rarely seems to come up in movie discussion circles. Part of this is due to the film being a somewhat innocuous, at times glaringly old-fashioned, comedy (in 1966, were there really teens who idolized Burt Lancaster and Jack Lemmon?) with no agenda beyond the modest desire to entertain while passing along a few life lessons and a simple message about growing up.

And while the above may serve as a fairly apt description of the movie on its most superficial level, I think it's a mistake to dismiss a film merely because its ambitions—which The Trouble with Angels surpasses with ease—are modest and chooses a light comedy touch over the bellylaugh sledgehammer. (Although I've never seen it, internet sources recommend the similar 1954 British comedy, The Belles of St. Trinian's for fans with broader tastes.)

For me, The Trouble with Angels remains one of my favorite "comfort food" movies; a thoroughly enchanting, fumy, sweet-natured movie capable of stirring up warm feelings of nostalgia. In this instance, the very distant memory I have of being young and the way movies like this made me associate organized religion with kindness, compassion, and empathy. Alas, these days religion and faith have become weaponized banners behind which so many cloak their bigotry, ignorance, and hatred.
Maybe it wouldn't hurt if some of those "fun nuns" made a comeback.

BONUS MATERIALS
Rosalind Russell reprised her role as Mother Superior in the 1968 sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, but Hayley Mills was conspicuously absent. Some say it is because Mills was back in Britain and overbooked with film projects. Others attribute it to the rumor that Russell and Mills didn't get along. A rumor supported by Rosalind Russell's 1977 autobiography, Life's a Banquet, in which Russell writes: "Haley Mills was a demon. She used to stick out her tongue whenever I passed (she couldn't stand me) and she was bursting at the seams with repressed sexuality."

Mills, for her part, has said that she adored Russell and was in awe of her and that the offending incident was her being silly with her co-star June Harding off-set and sticking her tongue out at a passing Russell in Mother Superior drag. Mills, playing around as her character, Mary Clancy, had no idea that Russell caught sight of it out of the corner of her eye, and thus a misunderstanding was born.  

In many ways, The Trouble With Angels marks Hayley Mills' last "girlish" film role. From 1967 on, she appeared in roles explicitly designed to promote a mature image and distance her from her Disney persona. In 1974, Hayley Mills dropped her Disney princess image for good (as well as her knickers) in the bizarre but oh-so-engrossing British thriller Deadly Strangers, co-starring Simon Ward and Sterling Hayden. A real departure and available on YouTube HERE

After a benefit premiere at which Russell, Mills, Harding, and Lupino appeared, The Trouble With Angels opened in San Francisco theaters and drive-ins on Wednesday, April 6, 1966

"The Trouble With Angels" 

Copyright © Ken Anderson        2009 - 2014