She is in her prime, she so frequently insists. But being in one's "prime" is overrated -certainly if this movie is anything to go by. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie -both the movie and the state it refers to- is a very different beast by the end of the story than it was at the start, though it does telegraph where it is going if you are paying enough attention. In attitude and disposition, Miss Jean Brodie is perfectly pleasant -a shrewd and charismatic teacher, with the class and articulation of any of her conservative peers, yet an unconventional, romantic streak to her instructional style as well. The kind of teacher who can and has influenced many a young pupil under her wing -but in this case well beyond the bounds of education and life lessons. She is rather skilful in persuading her girls into an air of snobbish entitlement, imposing on them manipulative sexual proclivities, and passing along her ardent belief in the grandness of fascism. All rather concerning for a figure of such dignified etiquette and lustrous ideals.
I come to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in honour of the late great Maggie Smith, who won an Oscar and rose to international prominence for this part that was her defining role until supplanted in the early 2000s by another slightly less fascist teacher character. It is entirely understandable -Miss Jean Brodie is an impeccable subversion of a well-known British character type that is probably a hell of a lot closer to the kinds of people who inspired that type than most would like to admit. Allegedly, Julie Andrews was offered the part at one time -which seems unbelievable, as Mary Poppins is exactly who Miss Brodie is not, much as she propagates an appearance to the contrary. The necessary dark edges of this part were not apparent in Andrews in the 1960s, but certainly they were in the less-known quantity of Smith, who showcases them shrewdly through her refinement. Truly a character of the new cinema, masquerading as one from the old.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was a book by Muriel Spark, based loosely on a real teacher she’d had as a girl, turned into a fairly successful play by Jay Presson Allen that the movie from director Ronald Neame (who had formerly co-written both Brief Encounter and Great Expectations for David Lean) is a more direct adaptation of. It is set in Edinburgh in the 1930s at an all-girls school called Marcia Blaine where Miss Brodie is one of its tenured instructors to the dismay of some of her fellow teachers and the school headmistress, who resent her divergence from typical school subjects and the effect she has on her students, who idolize and revere her personality and flowery history (she romanticizes heavily the death of a great lover). She also keeps a particular club each year, the “Brodie Set” -a handful of girls whom she singles out for greatness and goes out of her way to socialize with and apprentice. She has a romantic philosophy about teaching and claims egotistical ownership over the girls in her class. “All my pupils are the creme de la creme” she declares. “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.” That very well might be true, but not in so positive a way.
As much if not more than Miss Brodie, the film focuses its attention on her four-girl Brodie Set, and in particular the most inquisitive and precocious of the bunch Sandy (Pamela Franklin), who doesn’t quite fawn so much over her teacher, but is very curious of and compelled by her. The girls notably take a keen interest in her love life -an implicit aspect of her common refrain of being in her “Prime”- the relationship she enters into with fellow teacher Mr. Lowther (Gordon Jackson), who is in love with her while she sees the arrangement as merely casual, and also the intense sexual tension she still shares with the married art teacher Mr. Lloyd (Robert Stephens -Smith’s own husband at the time). Her choice of acting upon this is where we see the real deplorable depths of her psychology, and the incredibly toxic nature of cultivating her Brodie Set.
Miss Brodie does not see her girls as individuals but as extensions of herself that she can feed out to society and hopefully influence from the comforts of her schoolteacher position. This is fairly explicit in the propaganda she endows them with, quite far from the school curriculum, on the glories of Mussolini and Franco, whom she sees as strong leaders worthy of admiration and encourages her students to be good little advocates for fascism in Britain -her Brodie Set, without knowing its full scope, is inclined to consider it. Eventually one of them, Mary (Jane Carr) is persuaded to leave school to join her brother in the fight in Spain (unaware that her brother is actually fighting for the Republicans to the grave shock of Miss Brodie when she finds out).
But more immediately harmful is Miss Brodie’s manipulation of her girls as sexual pawns. Especially for the 1930s, she’s unusually frank with them about sex -and then she introduces them to Mr. Lloyd, outside the capacity of school, persuading them and him with private art lessons. And it becomes clear, especially to Sandy, that Jenny (Diane Grayson) is being groomed by Miss Brodie to be a sexual partner for Mr. Lloyd. Miss Brodie is a fascist after all, and using a eugenicist mindset, has singled out Jenny as Mr. Lloyd’s perfect partner, and one whom she can vicariously carry on her affair through -to the discomfort of Mr. Lloyd as he realizes it. Although it doesn’t stop him from carrying out an affair with Sandy all the same, whose response to the machination is one of envy and her own hasty desire for maturity that has been fostered by Miss Brodie. It should be noted that at this time it is unclear exactly how old the girls are. It’s a disarming thread, intentionally uncomfortable but also impeccably discerning as it illustrates sharply the psychology of this kind of grooming from both victim and perpetrator, not to be mistaken for sympathy by any means. Astonishingly insightful for its time.
The frankness with which the movie presents Miss Brodie’s politics is also compelling and very significant. Post World War II, a lot of democratic countries -especially the U.S. and U.K. have tried to culturally downplay the fascist movements that took root there and (for a time) fell out of fashion sharply during and after the war. Miss Brodie’s devout belief in Mussolini, Franco, and even Hitler felt taboo in the late 1960s but was merely a political flavour of the 1930s -not so different in publicity as say those who support libertarianism now. And this story does a good job showcasing how framing fascism in the abstract dilutes its real ideology and makes conversion more easy -especially in the ways that Miss Brodie conveniently ignores in her preaching it to her students its necessary politics of subjugation, the suppression of out-groups as determined by the state. On this topic the film doesn’t trivialize Miss Brodie for this or the intellectual effect of curiosity it has on her girls. It is a rather stern reminder actually and a cautionary warning against complacency to the seeds of evil ideologies. And boy does that ever resonate right now.
Apart from Smith, a standout of the movie is her opponent, framed initially as the stuffy administrator only to grow into something of a heroine as Miss Brodie’s virtues are systematically undercut: the headmistress Miss Mackay, played by a sterling Celia Johnson. Her resolute toughness is striking in the face of Miss Brodie's laissez-faire defiance, and though it's a shame we don't see her in more of an explicit anti-fascist light (predominantly she objects to Miss Brodie's attitude and skirting of school rules), but she does become a champion of the students at the eleventh hour following Mary's tragic death en route to the war in Spain (her train having been attacked by the Francoists doesn't seem to click with Miss Brodie, who promptly mourns her as a fascist martyr). Though it is really Sandy who brings down Miss Brodie, broken by the death of her friend and not so indoctrinated that she can't see Miss Brodie was the cause. Miss Mackay's pride in finally getting to fire the teacher who claimed assassination was the only way she would leave Marcia Blaine is only exceeded by the final confrontation between Sandy and Miss Brodie, in which the former lays out a screed of well-formed vicious contempt that Miss Brodie is powerless to refute -of particular satisfaction is the gusto with which she gets to break Miss Brodie's mind in revealing she, not Jenny, carried on her vicarious affair with Mr. Lloyd. It's a stupendously composed, brilliantly performed scene -the flailing desperation of a woman whose world is suddenly in tatters.
The fate of Miss Brodie runs curiously parallel to that of another famous cinematic teacher, Robin Williams' Mr. Keating of Dead Poets Society -only her dismissal is justified, her role in a student's death more tangible, and though she too amassed a collective of loyalist students, there are none to proclaim "Oh Captain My Captain" to Miss Brodie. But the spirit lingers of both. The Brodie Set continue to be haunted by her in the grim evocation of the movie's final moments (only to be succeeded by a somewhat inappropriately cheery song). The trauma she has caused has effectively made them indeed "hers for life", and it is a powerful statement on abuse that the movie leaves you with. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is intended as an ironic title, the character is drawn as an ironic image of an archetype, and yet there isn't a trace of dishonesty in either. Miss Brodie is in HER prime, though it may not be so for anyone else. And it is frightening that the descendants of her Brodie Sets are, in this political and institutional climate, on the verge of reaching it themselves.
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