"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969)

                                      

Back to School: 

This is Part 1 in a series about teachers, students, and the classroom experience.  We are struggling between sending children and teachers back into classrooms, or continuing with stay-at-home, virtual learning, as virus cases and fatalities increase.  

I wonder how my life would have changed if I were a student during a pandemic.  As much as I want to see a safe re-opening, I remember how important the start of every school year was to me: the new teachers, the possibility of new friendships, even the anxieties of gym class, none of which would have been possible in a home-based, virtual classroom.

Re-visiting the movies of a particular era, that shaped my idea of school, is a nostalgic and reflective experience. It drives home how the uncertainty over reopening schools must affect the psychological and educational well-being of students and teachers.

                                       

“THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE” 

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.”  Maggie Smith, as Miss Jean Brodie

There are many movies about teachers, students, and the school experience..  One film, which influenced me at a young age, is now a deeper emotional experience for me. Watching it decades later,  I understand the film's subtleties of the humor, and the complexities of the human condition, things that escaped me at age twelve.  

“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” is a mature portrait of a complicated character, a reminder that teachers are deeply human. Jean Brodie is a teacher whose class I wished I could have attended when I first encountered her at age twelve.  Now, I feel deep sympathy for her as a human being, and understand her flaws.

Jean Brodie is an invincible, flamboyant figure at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in 1930s Edinbugh. She is popular with her students and highly influential. She is a formidable presence, witty and sharp.  She believes that safety is less important than goodness, truth, and beauty.  At the start of every term, she announces that it is her mission to put “old heads on young shoulders”, and that her girls are the “crème de la crème”.

To Jean Brodie, teaching the status quo results in petrification.  She believes that education (from the Latin educare, or ‘bring forth’) is a process of “leading out” that which is already there. Conventional teaching, on the other hand, or forcing knowledge into young minds, she equates with intrusion (from the medieval intrusio, or ‘thrusting in’).

Miss Brodie’s is a controversial figure. Her tragic flaw, apart from ignoring the school’s traditional curriculum, is her admiration for controversial political figures like Mussolini and Franco, which she proudly proclaims in lectures to her students.  Her politics, which seem innocent at first but are highly uncomfortable from the perspective of time, take root slowly, with unfortunate results.

Miss Brodie mesmerizes her girls with stories of romance, poetry, art, and her unconventional ideas.  Her reveries thinly disguise the emotional and sexual awakening that she is experiencing in her “prime”.   Her young adolescent charges are intrigued by her, devising amusingly romantic scenarios with Miss Brodie as their heroine

Four of her girls are singled out for special attention.  The “Brodie Set” are privileged with picnics, gallery walks, and weekends in the country during their four years at Marcia Blaine. Monica is smart and sensitive, responding emotionally to Miss Brodie’s passionate classroom tales.  Jenny is Miss Brodie’s self-professed alter ego, a beauty who Jean imagines will have many love affairs.  Mary MacGregor, a new girl, is a stuttering, wealthy orphan who has a tragic awakening under Miss Brodie’s tutelage.  

And Sandy, Miss Brodie’s confidante, is a probing, confrontive beauty, whose dependability hides a growing resentment that kicks the drama into high gear.

Brodie is disfavored by the prim and conventional Headmistress, Miss Mackay.  The dislike is mutual.  Apart from a complete disagreement in educational philosophy---Miss Mackay champions hard knowledge, while Miss Brodie is all about culture—there are undercurrents of personal antagonism. Miss Mackay wants to fire Jean, but Jean fiercely defends her calling and her passion as a teacher.

We learn that Jean has had a life-changing summer romance in Italy with the art teacher, Teddy Lloyd.  He is married with six children, but loves Miss Brodie and doggedly pursues her.  She is also involved in a barely discreet relationship with Gordon Lowther, the easygoing, strait-laced music teacher.

As Jean starts to blur the line between personal romance and her relationship with her girls, she becomes sadly delusional, living vicariously through her girls, manipulating their lives according to her design.  When Sandy, who is experiencing her own awakening, is disappointed in her romantic pursuit of Teddy Lloyd, she seeks to destroy Miss Brodie out of jealousy and self-righteousness.

(The repeated use of the word “assassin” must have given the film an edge in that turbulent time.)

“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” is a funny, stirring, gripping, and ultimately shattering movie about a magnificent, flawed, complicated woman.  Fortunately, it is the wonderful Maggie Smith who gives life to Jean Brodie in all of her grandeur, wit, and vulnerability.  

Smith is slightly over the top as she moves, head erect, hand waving in the air like a queen, her high-pitched voice lilting in a heavy Scottish accent.  Then she finds the heat of her character in intense monologues that are riveting. Or she breaks your heart as she soldiers through a lecture about Rome as she knows that her life is falling apart. It is truly an astonishing portrayal of an unforgettable character.  Smith got a well-earned Oscar amid some excellent competition for Best Actress.

Robert Stephenson (Maggie Smith’s real husband at the time) plays Teddy Lloyd with roguish charm.  Celia Johnson, as Miss Mackay, is a treasure. Her precise diction and her head-to-head exchanges with Smith are classic. 

Among the girls, Jane Carr is poignant as Mary MacGregor; but it is Pamela Franklin who stands out as Sandy.  She is cool, cunning, and convincing playing a girl between age 12 and 17. (She also has a startling nude scene in the artist’s studio which was a bit shocking even in 1969, when screen nudity was becoming acceptable.)  Sandy’s final scene in Miss Brodie’s classroom invokes complicated feelings.  The film’s final closeup is of her, walking tearfully, as Miss Brodie’s words echo in her head. It is a sad moment of regret that affected me deeply.

The film is a free adaptation of Muriel Spark’s experimental novel.  Jay Presson Allen, whose screenplay is based on her play of Sparks’ novel, tells the story chronologically, writes intelligent dialogue and creates many layers to Miss Brodie’s character. Where the film is less convincing is in portraying Jean Brodie’s extreme political ideology.  It seemed out of character, considering Jean’s love of truth and beauty. It played like a plot device; the film could have resolved in much the same way without it.

That aside, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is an original portrayal of teachers and students.  In its flights of fancy, it stirs the imagination, showing how a learned teacher can inspire the thoughts and dreams of her students. It's also a cautionary tale about where the lines of inspiration are best not crossed.   Ronald Neame directs with sensitivity, keeping the pace lively.  Rod McKuen’s music, and especially his theme song “Jean”, which was a popular hit in 1969-70, captures a Scottish melancholy in a romantic ballad.

The late 1960s and 70s saw a number of theatrical films about school and teachers.  Along with "Jean Brodie" there were, among others, "To Sir, With Love", "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", "Up the Down Staircase", the ABC-TV drama series "Room 222", "Sounder", and "The Paper Chase". These movies captured the experience with a degree of respect for learning that audiences expected, and accepted.  I loved school, and these films gave me a positive image of what school could be.

Over the decades, movies about school and teachers continued to be made, but they tended to satirize the experience, or hold it up for ridicule ("Animal House", "Clueless", "Fast Times at Ridgemomt High", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", etc.).  Even a well-meaning film like "Dead Poet's Society" came off as artificial.  Not until the recent "Lady Bird" has cinema captured the school experience with real honesty and heart.  Otherwise, movies about school have all but disappeared from theaters.  (Are there any contemporary movie dramas that show students with their laptops?)  

I hope movies about school are not relics of another era, just as I hope the experience of school is not becoming extinct because of the virus.  I would hate to think that today's young people no longer have the irreplaceable experience of attending school in the traditional way, nor do they have stories and characters in movies like "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" to inspire them over a lifetime.