The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Directed by Ronald Neame
Written by Jay Presson Allen from a novel by Muriel Sparks
1969/US
IMDb link
Repeat viewing/YouTube

[box] Jean Brodie: Little girls! I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon, King of Arms, I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime. And my summer in Italy has convinced me that I am truly in my prime.[/box]

This study of delusion and comeuppance has held up very well over the years.

The action takes place over several years in the mid-1930s.  Miss Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith) teaches middle-schoolers at a girls boarding school in Edinburgh.  She is passionate about her vocation.  She handpicks a set of “special girls” and seems to have their lives planned out for them, concentrating on the qualities she deems them to possess.  Sandy (Pamela Franklin) is the “dependable one”; Jenny is the “pretty one”, etc.  But Miss Brodie, with her lofty ideas of art and beauty and romance,  is not living in the real world.

She is carrying on with two male colleagues, one of them married.  This gets the girls’ pubescent minds in an uproar of speculation.  As the girls get older, Jean relishes encouraging their dreams of love and sex.  Miss MacKay (Celia Johnson), the Headmistress, thoroughly disapproves of Jean’s many excursions outside the curriculum but Jean resists any attempts to reign her in.  I’m going to stop here because the ending is just too good to spoil in any way.  With Robert Stephenson and Gordon Jackson as Jean’s lovers.

This is an old favorite and when I first started watching it, I though Maggie Smith might be overdoing it a bit much.  As I got into it, it seemed to me that her flamboyance suited her histrionic character perfectly.  Then, as Jean’s castle in the sky begins to crumble, Smith gets very raw and real.   Both Franklin and Johnson are equally superb.  Recommended to those looking for a good drama/character study.

Maggie Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actress.  Rod McKuen was nominated for his Original Song “Jean”.

Trailer (contains spoilers)