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From my favorite movies..

Absolutely the worst movie.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) *** (out of 4)Maggie Smith won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Jean Brodie, a teacher in Edinberg whose rather eccentric teaching style sometimes has the wrong impact on the girls in her class. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE is best remembered today for its Oscar win and there's no question that Smith delivers a fiery performance full of greatness. With that said, I honestly didn't love the film or find it as great as many other have. I thought there were quite a few problems including the pacing, which was just a bit too slow for me. At 116-minutes the slow pacing really made the film drag in spots and I think it could have benefited from running a tad bit shorter. I would also say that I had a hard time connecting with anything that was going on. I thought the film was fascinating because it didn't just show Brodie as a good person or a bad person. Instead it takes a rather honest look and shows her as a good human with flaws. Even with that I still wasn't able to fully get involved with the story as I found it to be going down a rather predictable path. However, the performances here are certainly excellent and reason enough to watch the movie. Smith is simply wonderful as the rather over-the-top teacher who has all sorts of anxieties. I really thought Smith did a marvelous job because this character really is all over the map but the actresses manages to perfectly nail all this weird sides of her. Pamela Franklin plays the supporting part of a woman who feels she's put down by Brodie and this here leads her to an affair with a married teacher. I thought Franklin was just as good as Smith and really liked the way she grew with her character over the course of the film. Both Gordon Jackson and Robert Stephens are also extremely good in their roles.

In 1932 Edinburgh, exacting "Marcia Blaine School for Girls" teacher Maggie Smith (as Jean Brodie) arrives for work. Stylishly outfitted and attractively approaching spinster-hood, Miss Brodie enjoys sharing personal love stories with her students. Brodie does not adhere to the school's curriculum. She teaches an admiration of Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator. Brodie is available for sexual affairs with fellow teachers. She loves art teachers, like Robert Stephens (as Teddy Lloyd). She loves music teachers, like Gordon Jackson (as Gordon Lowther). Understandably, this irks headmistress Celia Johnson (as Emmaline Mackay)...Brodie selects a group of girls for special attention, taking them to lunch and the opera. She also encourages a sexual relationship between an ex-lover and one of - as she calls them - "My girls." In this film, the four singled out as Brodie favorites are: spectacled Pamela Franklin (as Sandy), stuttering Jane Carr (as Mary McGregor), pretty Diane Grayson (as Jenny) and histrionic Shirley Steedman (as Monica). While Brodie is polite, cultured and engaging, she is a truly wretched teacher...This film received some unfair criticism for its depiction of the lead character. Although the "Jean Brodie" character is toned-down from the original novel by Muriel Spark, her behavior is not celebrated. The admiration for Fascism was not uncommon in the 1930s. That this political system led to monstrous evil was unknown to Brodie; furthermore, it seduced entire nations of people. Within the four walls of a classroom, teachers are dictators. This fits Brodie's character perfectly. Her nature is part of the drama...And we are captivated...The story of "Jean Brodie" is a warning. Most important to the its success is a bewitching lead performance - and Maggie Smith delivers marvelously. She won a much-deserved "Academy Award" as "Best Actress" for her impersonation. Also extraordinary is the supporting role played by Ms. Franklin. That Franklin was not even recognized with an "Oscar" nomination is one of the organization's many glaring errors. While not looking quite 12-years old, Franklin received her well-earned "Supporting Actress" honor from the "National Board of Review". Although Smith is the driving force behind the film's success, all other personnel are excellent.********* The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (2/24/69) Robert Neame ~ Maggie Smith, Robert Stephens, Pamela Franklin, Celia Johnson

Penetrating character studies work well in novels and on the stage, where the action may be concentrated in one location. They are not as often found in films, except where the "hero" is bigger than life or surrounded by lots of action as in such films as BRAVEHEART and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. Rarely does a film do what Ronald Neame's THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE does: shine a spotlight on a character and the small milieu in which she operates.Movies about charismatic teachers aren't new either, but in most cases the teacher is the clear hero of the story, inspiring his/her students to accomplish things they never dreamed they could. What sets PRIME apart is that Jean Brodie is a mass of internal and external contradictions whose effect on her pupils tends to turn out somewhat differently than she intends.Jean Brodie is a dreamer, somewhat of a narcissist, and takes pride in the influence she has over "her girls," who are known throughout the school as "the Brodie set." They take tea and dinner at her flat, they spend weekends with her at the home of the singing master Mr Lowther (Gordon Jackson), with whom Miss Brodie is having an affair but who later marries another woman. This affair is of particular interest because the students discover that it isn't the singing master that Brodie is in love with but the art master (Smith's then-husband Robert Stephens), with whom she slept once but refuses to continue the affair because he is a married man.Jean Brodie is a fascinating woman, warts and all. She brazens her way through life despite having some very wrong-headed ideas: she idolizes Mussolini and Hitler, and her admiration for Franco inspires one rather dim-witted girl to decamp and head off to fight for Franco, where she believes her brother to be. He is, in fact, fighting on the other side, and the girl is killed in a train wreck before she even gets there, never knowing her mistake.At bottom, what makes Jean Brodie the most interesting is that she chooses to teach at a highly conventional school where her ideas are almost universally frowned upon by the headmistress and the rest of the faculty (with the exception of the two males whom she manipulates). It is this fact that ends up being her undoing, as one student finally sees through her and confronts her with the truth about herself in a scene that positively shoots fireworks off the screen.Maggie Smith is magnificent; this is one of the greatest performances by a leading actress ever committed to film. She is aided and abetted by an astounding cast of superb actors, all of whom fit their roles so perfectly that we forget we are watching actors.The children are especially good here. The kids are always the riskiest part of making a film about a school; the results can be somewhat uneven as in DEAD POETS SOCIETY. Here, the "children" hold their own against the adult actors remarkably well, with special kudos going to Pamela Franklin for her brilliantly penetrating study of the girl who finally sees Miss Brodie for what she is.At the end of the day, I found it hard to come to a conclusion about Jean Brodie. She is obviously wrong-headed and stubborn about certain things, but she also encourages independent and critical thinking in her pupils at a time when conformity was the order of the day. The fact that her real agenda is to create a group of Brodie clones ("the crème de la crème," as Miss Brodie would have it) is one of the great ironies of both her character and the film itself. The other great irony is that the very philosophy of critical thinking that she imparts to "her girls" is precisely the force that eventually drives Sandy (Franklin) to betray her to the headmistress and thus cost her her position. The film ends with Sandy walking placidly away from her final confrontation with Jean, who rushes out the door of her classroom and shouts "Assassin!" twice at the girl's retreating back.In the novel, Jean Brodie's defeat is total; forced into "early retirement," she dies some few years later. But the Brodie of the novel is a good fifteen to twenty years older than the Brodie of the film (at thirty-five, Smith was herself definitely in her own prime, which informs her characterization), and while her fate is left to the imagination of the audience, it is hard to believe that Jean's defeat is total and one suspects that with her strength of will she would eventually come out on top in the end. Possibly she might have to leave Edinburgh and seek a post elsewhere, but it seems certain that she would think of something.This is really a film for people who like to watch great actors ply their craft. Smith strikes all the right notes; she is to acting what Paderewski was to the piano. And the supporting cast is the orchestra that makes this concerto unforgettable.Note: This one rewards multiple viewings.

The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie hit an entertainment trifecta so to speak. A successful novel by Mary Spark, a successful Broadway play with a 379 performance run in 1967-69 and finally an Academy Award winning film, you can't do better than that. Not to mention the Tony Award it won on Broadway for Zoe Caldwell. The starring title role is a choice one, it garnered both a Tony and an Oscar for the two different actresses who played it.On screen once you see Maggie Smith play the headstrong teacher Jean Brodie from a girl's school in Scotland in the Thirties you will not forget her. If you've seen the Alfred Hitchcock classic Rope you have some idea what Jean Brodie is all about. In Rope James Stewart plays an iconoclastic teacher who talks about superior beings and later on he sees what kind of influence he's had on impressionable youth at the fancy prep school he teaches at when Farley Granger and John Dall do a thrill killing because they've convinced themselves they're somehow superior.Stewart's students do damage to others, Maggie Smith's charges do damage to themselves. Smith's students drink a little too deeply from her advice about being adventurous women and exploring the world. She's also an admirer of 'superior people' who become leaders and her example is Benito Mussolini in Italy who was legendary for making the trains run on time in his country. She also encourages her students to explore their sexuality, initiate themselves with an affair with an older man, all in the name of becoming worldly and modern females. That does not sit well with principal Celia Johnson who vows to get rid of Smith. In the end Johnson has ample ammunition to do the job. Young Jane Carr as the naive girl who takes Smith all too seriously goes off to Spain to fight in the Civil War there. Carr's brother is already there, but Carr listening to her teacher extol the virtues of that superior leader Franco goes and enlists on his side. She gets herself killed in Spain.But not before Pamela Franklin decides to lose her virginity to art teacher Robert Stephens who Smith was involved with. She also becomes a sadder and wiser girl way too young. But she delivers some really biting lines at both Smith and Stephens, exposing the pretensions both have.One thing that American audiences might not get is a small bit where Smith covers the portrait of Great Britain's Prime Minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin was the Tory Prime Minister in his third ministry at this point and he was first elected with the exciting slogan of Safety First. That could mean many things, but what it was taken by the British public to mean at the time was a calm and quiet leadership, a British version of Calvin Coolidge. Hardly the kind of guy that Jean Brodie would admire like Mussolini or Franco.Jimmy Stewart finds out and realizes just how his philosophy has effected his pupils, but for Miss Jean Brodie she remains absolutely clueless to the end. Nevertheless Maggie Smith's bravura performance of this clueless teacher won her a deserved Oscar.The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie also got an Oscar nomination for Rod McKuen's song Jean in the Best Song category. But the Academy voters gave the award to Burt Bacharach and Hal David for Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. They were clearly the best songs in 1969's field.Though Maggie Smith got the Oscar a lot of the other performances were also unforgettable. Celia Johnson, Pamela Franklin, Robert Stephens and Gordon Jackson who played another teacher that Smith was involved with are memorable, you will not forget Jane Carr as the touching and naive young girl who dies in Spain trying to impress her idiotic teacher. She should have been nominated herself in the Best Supporting Actress category.Jean, Jean, you will not forget clueless Jean Brodie once you've seen the film.