The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Ronald Neame (1969)
Ronald Neame, whose first 1960s film was Tunes of Glory, returned to Scotland for his last work of the decade. I’d seen The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie only once before, in my mid-teens, a year or two after its original release (an Odeon double-bill – those were the days – with Midnight Cowboy). I looked forward to revisiting it and, of course, to seeing the streets of Edinburgh on screen, especially as I may not get to them in real life in 2020. But this adaptation of Muriel Spark’s best-known novel – famous in its own right, for Maggie Smith’s celebrated, Oscar-winning performance – hasn’t aged at all well. The tone manages to be overemphatic yet uncertain. (Rod McKuen’s pleasant theme song, which he sings over the closing titles, suggests he had no idea what was going on in the film.) The main problems are the construction of Jay Presson Allen’s script and Neame’s limitations as a director of actors.
Allen, who would go on to write the screenplay for Cabaret, had adapted Spark’s novel for the stage a few years previously, simplifying the novel’s narrative. The story is set in the 1930s at the fictional Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, where the eccentric, charismatic Jean Brodie largely eschews the formal curriculum that she despises. She informs her class instead about her own romantic history, her holidays in Italy, her favourite artists and fascist leaders, especially Mussolini. She intends, she says, to educate her girls according to the original Latin meaning of the word – to ‘lead out … what is already there’. (The shared etymology of education and Il Duce is hard to ignore.) She would be an imposing character in any context. But on stage or screen, where her personality isn’t filtered through her pupils’ perspectives the way it is in the novel, her flamboyant gift of the gab makes Miss Brodie more conspicuously a star turn.
The play also reduces from six to four the number of pupils in her class who become the teacher’s chosen ones. Allen discards the character of Eunice Gardiner. She turns Jenny Gray and Rose Stanley into a single composite character called Jenny. She also makes a composite of Mary Macgregor and Joyce Emily Hammond, and calls her Mary. This last adjustment is the most significant. In the novel, Joyce Emily isn’t one of the elite Brodie set but becomes a separate project of Miss Brodie, who urges her to go and fight for the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Joyce Emily is killed in Spain when the train she’s travelling on is attacked. The reader learns that Mary died in a hotel fire several years after leaving school.
Miss Mackay, headmistress of Marcia Blaine, makes persistent attempts to get rid of the flagrantly non-conformist Miss Brodie and, at one point, tries to extract some incriminating evidence about her from Mary Macgregor, ‘thinking her to be gullible and bribable, and underrating her stupidity’. In Allen’s version, Mary’s personality is largely unchanged from the novel but it’s she, instead of Emily Joyce, who follows Miss Brodie’s advice to join Franco’s forces. By having a stammering dimwit like Mary pay with her life for her mentor’s irresponsible exploitation, Allen makes that even more unforgivable.
At the same time, Allen is intent on making her protagonist a victim too – brought low by the small-minded status quo represented by Miss Mackay, and thanks to the ‘treachery’ of another member of Miss Brodie’s crème de la crème, Sandy Stranger. The novel itself isn’t free of this conflict: Muriel Spark could be won over by the comic monsters she created (the title character in The Abbess of Crewe, for example); besides, Jean Brodie was inspired by her own most memorable teacher at James Gillespie’s School for Girls in Edinburgh. But Spark’s spare, continuously prose is discombobulating – you always understand what she’s saying but are never sure what she feels about it – and this authorial voice has no equivalent in Jay Presson Allen’s reworking. Her screenplay demands a director agile enough to sustain a high-wire balancing act, and Ronald Neame isn’t up to the job.
Though a far from inexperienced screen actress, Maggie Smith hadn’t previously had a lead film role of anything like this magnitude. If you didn’t know the facts before seeing The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, you’d likely assume that Smith had already played the part on stage. Even allowing that the character herself is a performer, Smith acts with a decisive confidence that sometimes gives the impression of a performance worked out in the theatre. Her technical skill and distinctiveness, both physical and vocal, are such that Neame, who was well used to working with thespian royalty, seems to stand back and let Smith do her technically elaborate thing – rather as he was enthralled by Alec Guinness in Tunes of Glory.
For me, Smith’s finest film performance is in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, where her eccentricity is a matter of incorrigible fact rather than theatrical bravura so I wasn’t surprised to be most impressed by her Jean Brodie in scenes where she’s angry and upset – and where Jean’s obliviousness comes through piercingly. These interludes seem disconnected, though, from Miss Brodie’s more typical behaviour. Much of the time, Smith is so on top of her line readings and comic effects that the actress’s intentionality bleeds into the character: Smith makes you feel Jean knows precisely what she’s doing and the result is somewhat alienating. The part had actually been played on the London stage by Vanessa Redgrave and, although she might not have saved this film, I rather wish she hadn’t turned it down.
Most of the supporting roles are well enough played individually – but that’s the problem. Ronald Neame can’t get things going between his actors. They frequently give the impression of performing in isolation; what someone else is doing in the scene they’re in seems to make no difference. This doesn’t matter with Ann Way in the virtually silent role of Miss Gaunt, the school secretary: it’s a self-contained turn and Way, with her extraordinary mouse-like features and scuttling movements, does it to fine, sinister effect. It’s less of an issue, too, in the case of actors as experienced as Robert Stephens and Gordon Jackson, who play the heroine’s polar-opposite lovers.
Stephens is Teddy Lloyd, the art master and a married, nominally Catholic father-of-six. Although Jean Brodie had only a brief fling with Lloyd, its aftermath is more enduring. In his studio, where he paints portraits of his wife and children and, in due course, members of the Brodie set, they all end up looking like Jean. Stephens is particularly good in his early scenes: he gives Lloyd a vivid, irritable offhandedness, whether he’s arguing with Jean or snapping at a class of girls giggling at art history nudity and his naming of parts. (Maggie Smith is emotionally freer in her scenes with Stephens, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that they were married at the time.) As Jean’s other suitor, the music teacher Gordon Lowther, Jackson is a painful confusion of timid and hearty. In capturing the character so well, however, he exposes the implausibility of the Lowther-Brodie romance. This man would run a mile from Maggie Smith’s formidable Jean.
The predetermined playing is more noticeable with the quartet of girls – Pamela Franklin (Sandy) Jane Carr (Mary), Diane Grayson (Jenny) and Shirley Steedman (Monica). They weren’t such seasoned pros (though none was a newcomer); besides, it’s crucial for the Brodie set to have a group dynamic, and that is conspicuous by its absence. Another difficulty with the girls was harder to avoid. The novel follows them through their time at Marcia Blaine from the ages of ten to seventeen; they’re in Miss Brodie’s class only until they’re twelve but their identity as ‘her’ girls persists throughout the senior school. The starting point of the story – 1932 – appears on the screen at the start of the film. In a picture rarely averse to labouring the point, it’s a shame that Neame didn’t put up a ‘Two years later’ notice to make clear when the girls start what is formally their post-Brodie schooling. All four actresses concerned were verging on twenty. They pass for younger and, with the help of changing hairstyles, do age in the course of the film but – except for Jane Carr’s Mary, with her moon face and emphatic naivete – they never seem pre-adolescent.
This is particularly true of Pamela Franklin as Sandy, the film’s most challenging role: any actress would be hard put to make a success of it but Franklin (memorably excellent as the child Flora in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents eight years previously) gives it a good go. Miss Brodie tells the plain, bespectacled Sandy she has ‘insight’ but that the prettier, more pliant Jenny has the ‘instinct’ that Sandy lacks: it’s Jenny, Miss Brodie prophesies, who will be a ‘great lover’, indeed, will become Teddy Lloyd’s lover. He does Jenny’s portrait but it’s Sandy with whom he has an affair and who poses naked for his painting of her. The clever, calculating Sandy’s transition into an artist’s mistress and model was, in more ways than one, a tough ask of Pamela Franklin, and she manages it admirably. But her lengthy showdown dialogues with both Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith are prime examples of Ronald Neame’s failure to sustain a current between actors. His treatment of Sandy’s eventual disloyalty to Miss Brodie doesn’t make sense even according to the screenplay’s reworking of it.
When Sandy sees a newspaper report of Mary’s death in Spain, her first thought isn’t to expose Jean as indirectly responsible but to break the news to her. She rushes to her flat, up the stairs, and, out of breath, knocks desperately on the door. Miss Brodie is at home but washing her hair and doesn’t hear. It’s only in the wake of her appalling speech to Mary’s fellow pupils – ‘Mary Macgregor died a heroine – it was her intention to fight for Franco against the forces of darkness’ – that Sandy thinks again. Yet in the final face-off between her and Miss Brodie, Neame seems to want the audience to see Sandy as a spiteful little sneak. As she walks away and Jean yells ‘Assassin!’ in her direction, the word echoes melodramatically on the soundtrack, and Sandy looks back as if to admit the accusation. Without the intervening sequence in which she tries so hard, and in such distress, to tell Miss Brodie the news about Mary, it might have been possible to believe that Sandy was taking revenge for the fact that, even when she modelled nude for Lloyd, he turned her into Jean on canvas. But that dash upstairs – perhaps Neame thought a bit of running would make things briefly cinematic – makes this interpretation impossible, makes it outrageous that Sandy is presented as the villain of the piece.
Muriel Spark’s use of flash-forward conveys Miss Brodie’s variable long-term impact on her girls. Rose ‘shook off Miss Brodie’s influence as a dog shakes pond-water from its coat’. The adult Sandy is a different matter. She becomes a nun and the author of a ‘strange book of psychology’ that brings her ‘so many visitors that Sandy clutched the bars of her grille more desperately than ever’. Asked by one such visitor to the convent about the main influences of her schooldays – ‘Were they literary or political or personal? Was it Calvinism?’ – Sandy replies (this is the novel’s last line): ‘There was a Miss Jean Brodie in her prime’.
The decision to jettison flash-forward is a signal of where the film-makers’ priorities lie: a purely linear narrative makes for minimal interference with the Jean Brodie show. But it still seems a weakening omission that the film doesn’t show what difference Miss Brodie makes immediately to her chosen few, who are rarely shown in relation to the non-elect members of the class. Apart from Sandy and Jenny’s funny and accomplished forged love letter from Miss Brodie to Mr Lowther, there’s little to suggest that her special girls are notably daring or imaginative. They seem, rather, to behave as bright, mildly precocious schoolgirls might be expected to behave. All that makes them special is how they’re used and, as a twenty-first century audience is bound to see it, abused by adults. The idea of the Brodie set accompanying Jean on her weekends to stay and sleep with Lowther is probably as hard for many modern viewers to accept as it is for Miss Mackay. Miss Brodie’s prediction of which of her girls will become Lloyd’s lover and his different choice in realising the matter now seem beyond the pale.
Celia Johnson’s Miss Mackay – with her determined self-control, spinsterly defensiveness and ever-increasing preoccupation with getting Miss Brodie dismissed – is the film’s most coherent characterisation. Miss Mackay is the embodiment of narrow-minded propriety, right down to Johnson’s nicely restrained hand movements. (These contrast with, yet compete with, Maggie Smith’s histrionic gestures.) Yet the eventual success, thanks to Sandy’s ‘betrayal’, of Miss Mackay’s campaign has an effect that Neame and Allen probably didn’t (and Muriel Spark certainly didn’t) intend. From a fifty-years-on perspective, at least, it’s a struggle to see the denouement in terms of repressive conservatism extinguishing a beacon of individualism and originality. You’re more likely to feel that Jean Brodie was a menace – a bizarre egomaniac who shouldn’t have been entrusted with children’s education. In any sense of the word.
28 April 2020