Kudos to screenwriter Jay Presson Allen for not shying away from the icky difficulties of the source material: Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which begins as a character portrait of a quirky teacher before revealing itself to be something much darker. And yet Allen, who wrote a stage adaptation of the novel before this, shies in a strange direction. Maggie Smith—decades before she would play Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter series—stars as the title figure, an iconoclastic instructor at an all-girls school in 1930s Edinburgh known for taking select students under her wing (“my girls”). At first she seems to be a welcome breath of fresh air amidst the stodginess of the education system of the time, until we begin to notice that her iconoclasm is strangely selective (she becomes infatuated with Mussolini and his Fascisti, for instance). On a more personal level, Brodie’s parallel flirtations with the school’s single choral director, whom she admires, and its married art teacher, whom she desires, take a perverse bent when she nudges some of her “girls” to be her romantic surrogate (these days we’d call it grooming). In the book this had the tinge of slowly dawning horror; in the hands of Allen and director Ronald Neame, it misguidedly plays like tragic romance. Still, Pamela Franklin, as one of Brodie’s girls/victims, gives a sharply intelligent turn that is (disturbingly) beyond her years, while Smith—who won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance—captures both Brodie’s charismatic appeal (she’s something of precursor to Robin Williams’ John Keating in Dead Poets Society) and her staggering self-delusion. Also striking is the collaboration between the costume and production design teams, placing Brodie in bright, angular, modern outfits that burst like fireworks amidst the stuffy, aged, monochrome walls of the school where she teaches.
(9/22/2025)
