“Colour enlivens the spirit,” says Miss Jean Brodie (Maggie Smith), tossing a supremely audacious smile at the frumpy principal (Celia Johnson) of Marcia Blaine school in Edinburgh, 1932. But Miss Brodie, who believes she teaches “art, beauty and truth”, is more than a splash of mauve and orange in the conservative grey of the school and the city.
Whether in Muriel Spark’s brilliant and biting novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Ronald Neame’s 1969 film of the same name, Miss Jean Brodie is never without sang froid. Just like Mona Lisa (whom Spark believes to have posed for her painting just after a visit to the dentist), nothing will stand in the way of Miss Brodie’s composure. Lest we forget or do not notice, she reminds us frequently, “I am in my prime.”
The key to enjoying this film is to savour its words. Every bon mot Miss Brodie utters about the déclassé all around is what makes her as exciting as Egypt.
In adapting Spark’s novel for both stage and screen, Jay Presson Allen makes changes in structure but keeps the dramatic, narcissistic, and dangerously irresponsible Jean Brodie completely full-blooded. Reports have it that in spite of the memorable Miss Brodies on stage – Vanessa Redgrave (London) and Zoe Caldwell (Broadway) or Geraldine McEwan on television, it is the Academy Award winning, invincible performance of Maggie Smith which gives Miss Brodie her enduring chic charisma.
“Deep in most of us is the potential for greatness or the potential to inspire greatness,” opines Miss Brodie as she launches on her mission to create girls who are guaranteed to be “crème de la crème” only because they have her as their teacher.
Classroom scenes in the film show Miss Brodie to be passionate and pensive, but also personal. She quotes Keats and sighs over Hugh, her fiancé, who “fell in Flanders field like an autumn leaf ”. She has other tales too – that the school management conspires to make her resign, but she will not fall prey to any “petrification”. All this holds her “little gels” captive as they learn to think and talk the unconditional Brodie way – Giotto over da Vinci, Europe over provincial Edinburgh, and individuality over team spirit. After all, team spirit did not make Shakespeare’s Cleopatra or Anna Pavlova, did it? But “for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like,” Miss Brodie says flatly.
Unlike the novel, the dialogue of the film also fleshes out the personalities of Miss Brodie’s lovers. On the one hand there is the obsessive (but married) art master, Mr Loyd (Robert Stephens) who paints every portrait in sinister likeness to Miss Brodie since she spurned him. On the other, there is the innocuous music master, Mr Lowther (Gordon Jackson) with whom Miss Brodie spends weekends at Cramond, often taking her girls with her. The jejune schoolgirl prurience in Miss Brodie’s dalliances make for some hilarious scenes in the film and Sandy (Pamela Franklin) sparkles in them.
Another compelling moment is when the principal, desperate to fault Miss Brodie in one way or another, confronts her with a love letter to Mr Lowther that is signed in Miss Brodie’s own name, but which she has not written. The three stalwart actors in the room play out a very talky scene with consummate éclat.
The alarming aspects of the story come along, however, when we learn of Miss Brodie’s redoubtable political leanings. Leaving dead Stuarts of the syllabus safe in the pages of textbooks, Miss Brodie’s girls are shown slides of Benito Mussolini while Miss Brodie herself sounds like a spin doctor of the Fascisti. (Later, Miss Brodie is held responsible for her adverse influence on Mary, one of her most devout disciples who dies fighting for Franco in Spain). Possibly even more disturbing is the fact that Miss Brodie’s own licentiousness includes fantasising and living vicariously through the sexual relations of her girls with the carnivorous Mr Loyd.
The novel announces cracks in the Brodie-controlled cohorts from the beginning, but the film progresses on a linear track and we see just how inexorably this betrayal from Miss Brodie’s aide-de-camp must pan out.
For all its grey in sets and characters, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a vibrant watch, replete with schoolgirl giggles until it spirals to its edge -of -the seat denouement. If she were not every bit as spiffy at 81 as she was at 34, Neame’s film could have been the prime of Dame Maggie Smith.
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