Cinema: Nuns Dimittis

The Trouble with Angels. Most comedies about nuns operate on the gradual-warm-up principle. The fun is controlled for a while by force of habit, but before long the sisters are gaily falling into swimming pools, wheeling school buses around as though they were Maseratis, or treating a math class like the starting line-up at Pimlico. In Angels, based on Jane Trahey's Life with Mother Superior, Mother Superior Rosalind Russell does none of these things. She wisely leaves such nonsense to lesser members of the faculty, while she herself wages a war of nerves with Hayley Mills and June Harding, a pair of cigar-smoking students who seem determined to overthrow dear old St. Francis Academy by force and violence.

The peccadilloes of a Catholic girlhood last for four long years, and only serve to misrepresent a good-hearted girl: at graduation time Hayley decides to enter the novitiate. Roz, a worldly comedienne, retains her dignity through several assaults of whimsy that would shake a saint. In one dreary episode, she is conned into buying scanty costumes for the school band. In another, she sends a shy little nun off to help a pack of screaming girls shop for their first brassières. Director Ida Lupino lets Angels swing lowest when she introduces a lay teacher, clad in passionate purple, whose specialty is "interpretive movement." Gypsy Rose Lee plays the part with all the boop-de-doo phoniness a second-rate show deserves.