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The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie hit an entertainment trifecta so to speak. A successful novel by Mary Spark, a successful Broadway play with a 379 performance run in 1967-69 and finally an Academy Award winning film, you can't do better than that. Not to mention the Tony Award it won on Broadway for Zoe Caldwell. The starring title role is a choice one, it garnered both a Tony and an Oscar for the two different actresses who played it.

On screen once you see Maggie Smith play the headstrong teacher Jean Brodie from a girl's school in Scotland in the Thirties you will not forget her. If you've seen the Alfred Hitchcock classic Rope you have some idea what Jean Brodie is all about. In Rope James Stewart plays an iconoclastic teacher who talks about superior beings and later on he sees what kind of influence he's had on impressionable youth at the fancy prep school he teaches at when Farley Granger and John Dall do a thrill killing because they've convinced themselves they're somehow superior.

Stewart's students do damage to others, Maggie Smith's charges do damage to themselves. Smith's students drink a little too deeply from her advice about being adventurous women and exploring the world. She's also an admirer of 'superior people' who become leaders and her example is Benito Mussolini in Italy who was legendary for making the trains run on time in his country. She also encourages her students to explore their sexuality, initiate themselves with an affair with an older man, all in the name of becoming worldly and modern females. That does not sit well with principal Celia Johnson who vows to get rid of Smith. In the end Johnson has ample ammunition to do the job. Young Jane Carr as the naive girl who takes Smith all too seriously goes off to Spain to fight in the Civil War there. Carr's brother is already there, but Carr listening to her teacher extol the virtues of that superior leader Franco goes and enlists on his side. She gets herself killed in Spain.

But not before Pamela Franklin decides to lose her virginity to art teacher Robert Stephens who Smith was involved with. She also becomes a sadder and wiser girl way too young. But she delivers some really biting lines at both Smith and Stephens, exposing the pretensions both have.

One thing that American audiences might not get is a small bit where Smith covers the portrait of Great Britain's Prime Minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin was the Tory Prime Minister in his third ministry at this point and he was first elected with the exciting slogan of Safety First. That could mean many things, but what it was taken by the British public to mean at the time was a calm and quiet leadership, a British version of Calvin Coolidge. Hardly the kind of guy that Jean Brodie would admire like Mussolini or Franco.

Jimmy Stewart finds out and realizes just how his philosophy has effected his pupils, but for Miss Jean Brodie she remains absolutely clueless to the end. Nevertheless Maggie Smith's bravura performance of this clueless teacher won her a deserved Oscar.

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie also got an Oscar nomination for Rod McKuen's song Jean in the Best Song category. But the Academy voters gave the award to Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. They were clearly the best songs in 1969's field.

Though Maggie Smith got the Oscar a lot of the other performances were also unforgettable. Celia Johnson, Pamela Franklin, Robert Stephens and Gordon Jackson who played another teacher that Smith was involved with are memorable, you will not forget Jane Carr as the touching and naive young girl who dies in Spain trying to impress her idiotic teacher. She should have been nominated herself in the Best Supporting Actress category.

Jean, Jean, you will not forget clueless Jean Brodie once you've seen the film.

'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' is a film that is rich in ideas. It tackles themes such as favouritism, stereotyping, sexuality, ontology and questioning. But more important than these issues that it explores well, the film is highly multi-layered and it manages to look at how things appear on the surface against what they really are. The film is a brilliant piece of work, however it is almost impossible to praise it without spoilers. So much of the film's power depends on the contrast between the start and finish of the film. This is emphasised by the use of the same type of scene at the beginning and end - with all of the emotional events wedged in between. Please do not read on any further unless you have already seen the film. I would hate to spoil the extraordinary experience of watching this film without knowing what is going to happen.

It is an amazing achievement for a film to make you love the protagonist at the beginning, then hate her at the end, and this film does that. It is not because Smith's character changes that we start to dislike her, but rather because our perception changes in the film. On the surface Miss Brodie appears to be an affectionate, caring woman who is fun to be around. But we eventually sink beneath the surface, and realise how manipulative she is, and how she is stereotyping and confining her girls when she praises them on their individual virtues. She doesn't care for the girls as children of her own, but more so her own tools. As Sandy points out in the final confrontation, Miss Brodie sees an individual function and narrow objective with each of her pupils.

The film explores ideas about love too, but it is actually more so manipulation in the end. The way that Miss Brodie draws men into her, like she is using them when she sees fit. She says that she is in her prime because she is at a stage in her life when she can control all elements - including the headmistress. She likes being around young minds because they are so easy to influence, and with the male teachers at the school, she uses her 'feminine charms' to entice them. She does not however have any means by which to control the female adults, and therefore she is not on friendly terms with any of them.

The acting in the film is excellent by all concerned. Maggie Smith is cunningly brilliant as the heroine/villain combination of friendly wit and below surface ideas that are almost sickening (like trying to create a younger version of herself in Jenny to satisfying her lovers). But, it is really Pamela Franklin's film. Her character matures in the film, defies stereotyping and sees beneath the surface. There are not words to describe how perfectly she plays Sandy, and considering that she was 19-years-old at the time, she plays a 12-year-old girl with amazing realism. She justly won the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress, and it is certainly one of the performances that I have seen of the decade, if not of all time.

The technical side of the film is not strikingly amazing, however some shots in the film are very carefully composed, and it seems more as if the director has decided to emphasise the script and performances, rather than try to create a visual feast. And there are deeper reasons for this too, because the film is about things on the surface not being as they seem. On the surface, the film has the look of any typical 1960s drama, but, if you look beneath, you should find a stunning, thought-provoking film that will stay in your mind long after the final credits.

When I saw this on its release I was mildly entertained by a story of fantasies and intrigues among the young girls and the staff of an Edinburgh boarding school. When I saw it more recently I thought there was more to it than that.

Many of the film's elements are still obvious. There is the tour de force by Maggie Smith as the central character, Miss Jean Brodie, who teaches the equivalent of a course in Western civilization; the wretched uniforms; the impressive gray stone buildings; the treachery of the now-mature adolescent Pamela Franklin; the comic moments among the emotional turbulence.

My initial impression was that Jean Brodie should not have been dismissed from the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. Oh, sure, she gets carried away by feverish enthusiasms and she cultivates a kind of cabal among the more devoted of her students but, after all, it's all that Jean Brodie has. She loves it. And what's wrong with giving the girls' minds a kick in the pants, except that it's difficult to visualize? If I'd been able to do for my students what she did for hers, I'd have been proud of it.

But a more thoughtful look at the film reveals much more in the way of ambiguity. We see so much of Jean Brodie that we come to know and identify with her. Yet some of her lessons inspire passions that are dangerous. One of her girls, Mary MacGregor, a sweet, stuttering, plump little dove, is swayed by Brodie's encomium to Mussolini. (Kids: He was the Fascist dictator of Italy in the 1930s and led the country into a disastrous political allegiance and war). Upon graduation, Mary goes to fight for the fascisti and is killed, upon learning of which Jean Brodie hails her as a hero. Jean Brodie also insinuates one of her students into bed with the Arts Master with whom she herself is in love, as a kind of substitute.

Jean Brodie also fails to recognize the burgeoning jealousy in one of her less adored students, Franklin, even when Franklin goes to bed with the Arts Master who paints her and makes her look like Brodie. (As an aside, Pamela Franklin looks just fine when she's completely naked. Any normal man would love to paint her. Even a blind man might enjoy it.) It's Franklin who finally undoes Brodie, with the help of prying aide who looks oddly birdlike with her domed forehead and chicken eyes, but what looks at first like a jealous bitchiness now looks a little more like Stanley Kowalsky pulling Blanche DuBois down from them dreamy pillars at Belle Rive.

It's still a tragedy. Nobody enjoys seeing someone else ruined, not even if that person was unwittingly misguiding others.

The second impression left by a recent viewing is that Jay Presson Allen's dialog is really smooth, innovative, and sometimes electric, though the voltage is deliberately kept low. "And I always thought that being asked to dance by a faculty member was an honor of some magnitude." That's a line from Jean Brodie's ex lover, the Arts Master, Robert Stephens. When Jean Brodie is told by Stephens that her quondam suitor, Gordon Jackson, is about to marry the chemistry instructor, Brodie claims to have encouraged it. "Don't you think that with a snap of my fingers I couldn't have sent her back to her gaseous empire?" Chemistry. Gaseous empire. It's neatly written and listening to it is a joy, except for the stupid theme song.

So says Miss Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith), the effervescent teacher at an Edinborough, Scotland girl's school in 1932. Miss Brodie isn't making this remark because she is pompous, opinionated, or domineering---she's simply warning her charges not to take everything she says so literally, or basically warn them, like some cartoons do, "Do not try this at home". Miss Brodie's personality is obvious the moment she tells one of her new charges, "For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like." Yes, you could call her eccentric, and she'd probably agree. She's also very progressive, and that really bothers the imperious head mistress (veteran British actress Celia Johnson). At first, Miss Brodie seems well loved, and that she is, by her pupils, but it's very apparent that some teachers would like to see her go. Try not to laugh at the bird-like assistant to Johnson that delivers a message with such a lemon-puckered smirk, or the very butch gym teacher. This is a film filled with such wonderful little touches that more than a single viewing of this film is needed to devour everything.

The wonderful Maggie Smith, with her delightful voice echoing in your ears like a symphony, is radiant. There is almost a glow about her, and it is easy to see why her performance won the Best Actress award, and why more than 40 years later, she is still as beloved as she was during her own prime. She gives her character an authentic Scottish accent, and makes her believable and human even with her eccentricities and faults which are slowly revealed throughout the story. But these faults do not make her unlikable, more controversial for such a conservative (and ultimately dangerous) time. Her speeches on Mussolini are eye-raising for sure, and the outcome of her advice to one student is the tragic misstep that will bring her past her prime in a very surprising way.

All of the actresses in the student roles are excellent, particularly Pamela Franklin as the girl who changes the most. The final scene of Franklin walking out of the school with Miss Brodie's words from years before echoing in her mind is unforgettable.

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1969): Maggie Smith, Pamela Franklin, Celia Johnson, Robert Stephens, Gordon Jackson, Jane Carr, Diane Grayson, Shirley Steedman, Lavinia Lang, Antoinette Biggerstaff, Isla Cameron, Rona Anderson, Margo Cunningham, Molly Weir, Ann Way, John Dunbar, Lesley Paterson, Heather Seymour, Gillian Evans, Antonia Moss, Kristin Hatfield, Diane Robillard, Jennifer Irvine, Janette Sattler, Helen Worth....Director Ronald Neame..Screenplay Jay Presson Allen.

"Young girls, I'm in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders...Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life"....

Released in 1969, this is Director Ronald Neame's film adaptation of the Broadway play by Jay Presson Allen which was itself based on the novel by Muriel Spark. Celebrated British actress Maggie Smith had performed the role of Miss Jean Brodie on stage and was the first choice to play the role for the film, with terrific reason. She won the Oscar for Best Actress 1969. The film is set in 1930's Edinburgh, Scotland, before the onset of WWII, as Fascism rises in Europe. Smith portrays Jean Brodie, an eccentric, idealistic, emotional, art-loving, freethinking and influential schoolteacher for a conservative private school for young girls. She is essentially a free spirit, a liberated woman who in her own words "puts old heads on young shoulders" and teaches young girls to blossom into individual, independent and adventurous heroines who think for themselves and who inspire others. But her methods - namely extracurricular activities such as outdoor picnics, boat trips, attending art galleries and the opera- are contrary to the principles of the school. Moreover, her constant lectures about non-conformity to the status quo, sexual freedom and discovering one's self is completely out of tune with the repressive conditions of the time. In effect, she's preaching the same things which were to be found in college campuses in the late 1960's. This causes controversy, especially when she butts head with the school headmistress Miss Mackay (wonderfully played by veteran British actress Celia Johnson). Things become even more difficult when she becomes the center of a love triangle. She is loved by two men - the shy music/voice teacher Gordon Lowther and the married-wit-children art teacher Teddy Lloyd (Robert Stephens). She was formerly Mr. Lloyd's lover but she has now become Mr. Lowther's lover. Her class of young girls, at an age in which they become curious about sexuality, discover Miss Brodie's love affairs, though keep it to themselves. While most of the girls follow her blindly, one girl - Sandy (Pamela Franklin)decides that she will not conform to Miss Brodie's teachings, this occurring when she develops into womanhood and finally thinks for herself. So ultimately, the story's theme is about the relationship between teacher and pupil. Miss Brodie admires Fascism, something which seems to have happened after her time in Italy under the rule of Mussolini. When she passes on the spirit of zeal and fervor to her most impressionable student - Mary (Jane Carr), it results in Mary leaving England to find her brother who has gone to fight in Spain. Due to misinformation, she seeks Franco's army to fight along with them but dies tragically. This finally strikes a blow to Sandy who betrays her teacher telling the administrators that she was responsible for teaching sedition and radical politics. Sandy's betrayal is at once a seemingly spiteful act and proof enough that she is possibly her most "dependable" student who has learned and applied her own teacher's lessons. Though it was not quite as Miss Brodie wanted, Sandy has proved to be her own woman and has freed herself from conforming. Everything has backfired. Miss Brodie is quite Fascist and dictator-like in her own way, teaching independence and liberalism but only as long as the girls grow up to be quite like her. Maggie Smith and Pamela Franklin take the lead in this drama, both having terrific chemistry, especially noteworthy is the final confrontation scene. This is possibly Maggie's Smith greatest role and one she must be very proud of. Wonderful script and bittersweet music by Rod McKuen, which won another Oscar for Best Music (The Title Song "Jean"). Filmed on location in England and Edinburgh. This is a must-see film for fans of Maggie Smith and those who love engaging drama.

Jean Brodie is a teacher at an exclusive Edinburgh girls' school in the 1930s. She is a complex character, embodying attitudes which today seem contradictory. She embraces progressive educational ideas at odds with the school's conservative ethos, preferring to interest her girls in art, culture, politics and philosophy rather than the official syllabus. She stresses that the word "education" is derived from the Latin "educere" (to lead out), seeing her role as leading out her pupils' own ideas by encouraging them to think for themselves. The teaching style of the headmistress and other teachers she characterises as "intrusion" (from "intrudere", to thrust in), the stuffing of heads with useless information. In the twenty-first century these progressive ideas might now seem outdated in their turn, but in the thirties they were daringly radical.

Her politics, however, seem incompatible with her educational philosophy. She is an unashamed Fascist, an admirer of Mussolini and Franco, even encouraging one pupil to fight for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. Yet she is not a wholly unsympathetic character.

It was highly controversial for Muriel Spark (the author of the original novel) to give a Fascist sympathiser positive qualities. It is normally an unwritten convention that such characters can only be depicted as outright villains. Communist sympathisers can be portrayed as romantic idealists, even in stories set at the time of the Stalinist purges (like Barbra Streisand's character in "The Way We Were"), but Fascists never. There was, however, a time in the early thirties when Fascism seemed to many to be a viable system of government, if only because the alternatives seemed so unappetising. Liberal capitalism during the Depression seemed to offer only mass poverty and mass unemployment, Soviet Communism only mass terror and mass starvation. For those like Jean Brodie, Fascism was not what it seems today, the political expression of irrational hatreds, but rather an idealistic belief that the choice between the Hooverville and the Gulag, between the Jarrow march and the Ukrainian famine, was no choice at all and that there must be a third alternative.

Jean's educational philosophy is clearly inconsistent with her political one. She never considers whether teachers who distrust authority and encourage pupils to think for themselves would be tolerated under a Fascist regime. As her lover Teddy points out, she is a romantic idealist who projects her own ideals onto the leaders she admires; if she had to live under their regimes, she would probably be bitterly disillusioned as she is a natural rebel against authority. (Despite her views on education, she always refuses to seek a position at a progressive school).

Quite apart from her politics, Jean has a number of weaknesses. Her educational philosophy is elitist, concentrating on a select group of favoured pupils at the expense of the others, and promising to make them the "crème de la crème". Her love life is unconventional for a spinster schoolmistress of this era- she is the lover of two male colleagues, one of them a married man. (He is unable to leave his wife for her because he is a Catholic, but one who follows his Church's teaching on divorce far more faithfully than he does that on adultery). She is, however, devoted to her girls, who mostly repay her devotion in full. When one of them betrays her to the headmistress, we can sympathise with her.

Although Teddy and Jean's other lover, Gordon, play important roles, the main dramatic conflicts are those between the female characters, between Jean and the headmistress and between her and Sandy, the girl who denounces her for her political views. In her dealings with the headmistress, our sympathies are with Jean; Miss Mackay is a sour-faced reactionary who bullies anyone who crosses her and is amazed when Jean stands up to her. Although Miss Mackay objects to Jean teaching politics in the classroom, she shows her own political sympathies by putting up posters of Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin.

In Jean's dealings with Sandy, our sympathies are more mixed. Sandy is a rather serious girl, very sure in her ideas, an attractive girl but one who hides her attractiveness behind thick pebble glasses. She objects not only to Jean's political ideas, particularly after the girl who goes off to fight in Spain is killed, but also to her style of teaching and the fanatical loyalty she attracts from some of the other girls, a loyalty Sandy sees as dangerous. Yet Sandy, who is a rival for Teddy's affections, may also have personal motives for her act of betrayal.

Two things about the film need to be mentioned. One is Rod McKuen's haunting theme song "Jean" (replaced in some recent versions by an orchestral arrangement). The other is director Ronald Neame's use of colour. The predominant colour, apart from a few outdoor scenes where the green of vegetation predominates, is grey- of the buildings of Edinburgh, of the classroom walls, of the girls' uniforms. This tone, however, is relieved by the bright colours- reds, oranges, pinks and purples- favoured by the more free-thinking characters such as Jean and Teddy. (Conservative ones like the headmistress dress very much in monochrome). When Sandy is shown dressed in a bright colour, it signifies her growing independence of mind- except in her case the colour is blue, a colour otherwise not much used in the film.

Maggie Smith well deserved her "Best Actress" award for her portrayal of Jean, which brought out all the many facets of her complex character. Her Scottish accent also sounded very convincing. The other remarkable performance in this film is from the teenage Pamela Franklin as Sandy; it always surprises me when watching this film that she did not go on to become a major adult star. Although the film was not itself nominated for an Oscar, I have always regarded it as one of the most intelligent and significant British films of the late sixties. 8/10