The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

This film always reminds me of a teacher we had at primary school who thought the best way of obtaining discipline from us unruly eight year olds was to stamp her foot and look at her watch. All that actually achieved was for us to make more paper aeroplanes from the torn pages of our “Modern Comprehensive Artithmetic”. Had she adopted the more engaging and thought-provoking style of this titular Edinburgh lady, then she might have got farther (or is that further?). Anyway, an outwardly rather puritanical woman, Muriel Spark’s “Miss Brodie” (Maggie Smith) conforms to the conservative curriculum of the “Marcia Blaine” school for girls and to the doctrine of it’s spinsterly headmistress “Miss Mackay” (Celia Johnson). She has her girls, her favoured pupils in whom she has great faith. There’s “Sandy” (Pamela Franklin), “Jenny” (Diane Grayson), “Monica, (Shirley Steedman) and the newly arrived “Mary McGregor” (Jane Carr) and with their foie gras picnics in the school grounds and in the classroom she instils in them the values of love, poetry, truth, literature and…of fascism. Initially that’s extolling the virtues of Mussolini, but it isn’t long before she’s moved to Franco. All the while, though, we are aware that this epitome of deportment has a bit of a past with the roguish arts master “Lloyd” (Robert Stephens) and is currently keeping the shy “Lowther” (Gordon Jackson) company on their frequent weekend visits to his ancestral Cramond estate on the Firth. She is rather effortlessly coasting through life, believing herself invulnerably perfect as she manoeuvres her favourites as if they were porcelain chess pieces. One of them, though, isn’t so happy being the pawn and in the best spirit of the worm that turned, could maybe bring this whole glass edifice crashing about their mentor’s ears. As “Miss Brodie” herself puts it, this is very much a story of “do as I say, not as I do” and Maggie Smith is super in the role. Her perfect attire, posture and clipped accent all work really well but so does her frustrated sexually charged rapport with Stephens whose own performance as the seedy but probably a great deal more honest philandering father of six also manages to get your skin crawling. Much as he was back in 1949 in “Whisky Galore”, Gordon Jackson also shines as the rather meek and feeble ditherer and I often think that Johnson maybe watched a cobra a few times to get ideas for her own character - one desperate to see the end of what she saw as a toxic influence. The original novel has been adapted so as to reduce some of the free kirk mentality but it’s still quite a potent tale of idolisation, indoctrination and hypocrisy that Ronald Neame has structured to allow Smith and Stephens to own as the girls to share the limelight and we do a fair degree of squirming.