The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Looking for a great Maggie Smith film? This isn't it.

By www.moviegoods.com, via Wiki. Fair use. This poster coulda come straight out of a 1969 Playboy ad for “what kind of man drinks Dewars scotch?”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Grade: D+

I’d had this on my library list since the brilliant Maggie Smith died last year. A lot of other people did, too; it look a while to come up at the top of that backlog. It really wasn’t worth the wait.

This is directed by Ronald Neame, who produced David Lean’s films before Lean wanted Sam Spiegel money to start blowing up trains. Neame would later do The Posiedon Adventure, which is truly silly but somehow had Gene Hackman giving one helluva performance as a brave reverend; and Hopscotch, which is also pretty silly but has Walter Matthau and the stunningly beautiful Glenda Jackson. Brodie is as visually bland and tacky as Poseidon, in that bland, tacky way almost every color UK film looked in the 1960s.

We open on a shot of rowhouses in Edinburgh, and if you think “this is gonna be one of those everything-in-the-UK-sucks-movies, like The Entertainer,” you’d be slightly wrong. It’s about how uppity ladies need to be taken down a notch. Miss Brodie teaches at an all-girls parochial school, and proudly tells the students how she’s “in her prime.” So you know that’s gonna come back to bite her on the keister. She’s the former lover of married, familied art teacher Robert Stephens, who looks a bit like Alan Rickman, although when Rickman did this kind of overacting, it was meant as a joke. Stephens is projecting to the back row of the theater (and this is based on a play). He and Smith were actually married at the time; one of their sons would play the baddie in the worst Bond movie. (There’s a lot of competition for that honor.)

When Smith is assaulting her chalkboard with taps so loud they’d wake zombies in Pennsylvania, or telling off her headmistress, she’s energetically kooky. But the ugly conception of the story is all about making her out to be a pretentious fool. So, she’s stringing Stephens along until she can land a richer husband (the fine Scottish actor Gordon Jackson, used almost as meanly as Smith is).

When Neame highlights the schoolgirls’ legs during gym class, you start to get a bit of a Yuck; when Smith tries getting a girl to fall for Stephens, so he’ll stop pestering her, you get a bigger Yuck; and when the evil, calculating Pamela Franklin is nekkid for Stephens, you might start asking yourself “what the heck is going on, here?” Franklin was 18 when this was shot, but the character’s meant to be even younger. (In years, not craftiness — we know she’s too crafty for her own good, because she wears glasses. Girls who wear glasses are either homely nerds or evil schemers in movies like this.) And we’re given to understand that no man of around 40 could possibly resist advances from a teenager. This should be played for irony, especially as Miss Brodie is almost fired for sleeping over at Jackson’s place; it’s not. Cue Billy Idol singing “Cradle of Love,” I guess.

What Brodie DOES get fired for are her Fascist sympathies. I have a hard time believing that, in 1933, leaning Fascist would get you in any trouble in Scotland; certainly, much of the English upper-class thought Mussolini was a fine fellow for cracking down on those dastardly leftists. It also seems to be that the headmistress just hates Brodie for not rapping enough knuckles with rulers, I guess. (The headmistress is Celia Johnson, from Brief Encounter — she might be playing that character 25 years later and still flogging herself for almost bonking Trevor Howard.)

Naturally, at the end, there’s a scene where the teenager flaunts how she seduced that art teacher right under Miss Brodie’s upturned nose. She boasts to Brodie how she beat her at the Game of Mantrapping, and Brodie calls her out for being a cold little bitty. And we’re supposed to hate both of them equally. I was just mad at Neame.

Although, I might have been mad at the wrong person; it's unclear. The script (and the play) are by Jay Presson Allen, who attended a girls’ school in Texas and didn’t like it; the novel is by Muriel Spark, who attended a parochial Scottish school and befriended a charismatic teacher there, one who (like Miss Brodie) would never be married, and had Fascist sympathies. Was Spark mad at herself for idolizing a teacher whose politics she’d later loathe? I know I had one pretentious teacher in junior high that I probably would have jumped through hoops of fire to please, was probably half a tyrant, and picked obvious class favorites, like Miss Brodie did; I wasn’t one of them. I’m not mad at myself over it. I was a kid! Kids want to please authority figures.

There’s a ugly plot point about a “dim” girl with a stutter that Miss Brodie picks as one of those favorites; she ventures off to join her brother fighting in the Spanish civil war, mistakenly thinking he’s on Franco’s side, like Miss Brodie wants. She is killed in a train attack we hear about, and Miss Brodie thinks that’s about all she would have ever been any good for (she loves predicting her students’ futures). Eventually, the Cradle of Love teen sets Brodie straight — the dim girl’s brother was fighting on the anti-Franco side. That’s meant to be the ultimate blow to Brodie’s inflated ego. Both the teen and Brodie are shown as not really caring about the dead girl at all, she’s a point to make in an argument. I’m afraid the movie doesn’t seem to care much about her, either.

If, like me, you want to remember just how terrific Maggie Smith was, this isn’t the movie to do it with — she does have some good quiet moments, but not enough of them. You can go pick up Gosford Park, instead, or even The Lady In the Van. That last one’s written by Alan Bennett, who also wrote The Madness of King George and a 1984 movie I’d never heard of, A Private Function. Hmm, that one has Maggie Smith in it! Maybe it’s good? Only one way to find out!

Incidentally, the musical score for Miss Jean Brodie is by… Rod McKuen. Who is Rod McKuen? He was a kind of schmaltz poet-musician, sold a gazillion records, and was noted for his soothing style. Well, his stuff is kitschy, and the score here isn't the best; it veers between too many John Barry strings and the kind of “wacky hijinks” music Henry Mancini gave us for the Mickey Rooney parts of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But if anyone deserved a successful soothing career, you might say McKuen did. His childhood sounds as though it was horrifically abusive. Well, at least McKuen gave us the legendary cover to 1977’s Slide… Easy In album. And I always enjoyed this little clip from The Critic: