| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | |
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Original film poster |
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| Directed by | Ronald Neame |
| Produced by | James Cresson Robert Fryer |
| Written by | Jay Presson Allen |
| Based on | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark |
| Starring | Maggie Smith Robert Stephens Pamela Franklin |
| Music by | Rod McKuen |
| Cinematography | Ted Moore |
| Editing by | Norman Savage |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) | 2 March 1969 (United States) |
| Running time | 116 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a 1969 drama film, based on the novel of the same name by Muriel Spark.
The novel was turned into a play by Jay Presson Allen, which opened on Broadway in 1968, with Zoe Caldwell in the title role, a performance for which she won a Tony Award. This production was a moderate success, running for just less than a year, but it has often been staged by both professional and amateur companies since then.
Allen adapted her play into a film in 1969, which was directed by Ronald Neame. It is remembered for Maggie Smith's performance in the title role, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. There was also a notable performance from Pamela Franklin as Sandy, for which she won the National Board of Review award for Best Supporting Actress. It was entered into the 1969 Cannes Film Festival.[1] Rod McKuen was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song for "Jean", which became a huge hit for the singer Oliver in autumn 1969.
The film was released on DVD in the UK by Acorn Media in July 2010
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There were two married couples in the cast: Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, and Gordon Jackson and Rona Anderson.
Jean Brodie is a teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1930s. Known for her tendency to romanticize fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco, she devotes her time and energy to her four special girls, called the Brodie set: Sandy, Monica, Jenny and Mary McGregor. Mary, a new girl with a stutter, first had troubles with the other three, but eventually all four became close.
The set often go to art museums, theatre, concerts, have picnics on the school lawn, among other things, which rather upsets the school's austere headmistress, Emmeline Mackay, who dislikes the fact that the girls are cultured to the exclusion of hard knowledge, and the Brodie girls seem precocious for their age. She also seems to have a running grudge against Brodie, who has tenure.
Besides working with her girls, Jean catches the eye of music teacher Gordon Lowther, who she and her girls spend a lot of time with at his home in Cramond, a seaside village on the outskirts of Edinburgh. (She sometimes spends the night with Mr. Lowther, although she tries to conceal this from the girls.) Mr. Lowther wants them to get married, but Brodie drags her feet. She still has feelings for her married ex-lover, Teddy Lloyd, who is the art teacher in the senior section of the school.
Also working with Brodie (and all somewhat disapproving of her unorthodox teaching methods and her influence on the girls) were Miss Campbell the gym teacher, the sewing mistresses Miss Ellen and Miss Allison Kerr, Miss McKenzie the strict librarian, and Miss Gaunt the headmistress's mouselike, non-talking secretary. Miss Gaunt's brother is a deacon at Mr. Lowther's church who eventually asks for his resignation as organist and elder because of his relationship with Miss Brodie.
Between the years, Miss Brodie rises to her apex, and also falls, given that Miss Mackay and most of the other teachers and staff at the very conservative school want her to no longer teach there. During the downfall, she loses Mr. Lowther, who gets engaged to Miss Lockhart the chemistry teacher, one of the only teachers at Marcia Blaine who was sympathetic towards Miss Brodie as a person and to her teaching style.
As the Brodie Set grow older and become students in the Senior School, she tries to manoeuvre Jenny and Mr. Lloyd into having an affair, and Sandy into spying on them for her. However it is actually Sandy (who grows resentful of Miss Brodie's praise of Jenny's beauty) who has an affair with Mr. Lloyd. Sandy ends the affair because of Mr. Lloyd's overwhelming obsession with Miss Brodie.
Mary McGregor, influenced by Brodie, sets out to Spain to join her brother who she believes is fighting for Franco, but she is killed when her train is attacked shortly after crossing the frontier. This finally leads Sandy into betraying Miss Brodie to Miss Mackay and the school's board of governors, who finally decide to have Miss Brodie's job terminated.
At the end, Sandy confronts Miss Brodie on her crimes, most especially her manipulation of Mary; her part in her senseless death, for which she is unapologetic; and the harmful influence she exerted on other girls; and adds that Mary's brother is actually fighting for the Spanish Republicans. She then walks out of her classroom, with a frantic Miss Brodie screaming "Assassin!!" at Sandy. Sandy, however, doesn't look back.
After the confrontation, Sandy, Monica, and Jenny graduate along with the other girls. Despite knowing full well that she had betrayed Brodie to Mackay and the board of governors, Sandy did so out of concern for any other girl who could have been a target of Miss Brodie and her fanatical ways, and, perhaps too, resentment over Miss Brodie's preference for Jenny and Teddy Lloyd's unending obsession with Miss Brodie.
At the end of the film as Sandy leaves the school for the last time, her face streaked with angry and bitter tears Miss Brodie (in voiceover) stated her usual motto: "Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life."
The film currently has 91% positive of 11 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.[2]
There is a complex relationship between the novel, the play and the film.
Although Allen did manage to create a successful play out of what may not have been the easiest of novels to adapt, some have questioned whether it is a particularly faithful adaptation. It turned an experimental work into a realistic one, and removed some theological issues, turning it into a story of failed love.[3]
The play reduced the number of girls in the Brodie Set from six to four (and discarded another girl not in the set) and some of them are composites of girls in the novel. Mary is a composite of the original Mary and Joyce Emily; although mainly based on the original Mary, in the novel it was Joyce Emily who died in the Spanish Civil War, and rather more is made of this incident in the play than the novel. Jenny is a composite of the original Jenny and Rose; in spite of her name she has more in common with Rose, since in the novel it was she who Miss Brodie tried to manoeuvre into having an affair with Mr Lloyd.
The novel made extensive use of flash forward. The play largely abandoned this, although it did include a few scenes showing Sandy as a nun in later life. The film also made a few changes from the play, the biggest being that it discarded these scenes and was entirely linear narrative.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was adapted by Scottish Television into a seven episode television serial in 1978, also written by Jay Presson Allen, and starring Geraldine McEwan. Rather than recapitulate the plot of the novel, the series imagined episodes in the lives of the characters in the novel, such as conflict between Jean Brodie and the father of an Italian refugee student, who fled Mussolini's Italy because the father was persecuted as a Communist.
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