Plot intro
Jean Brodie (HRH Maggie Smith) is a passionate and defiant teacher at an all-girls’ school in Edinburgh during the 1930s. She demonstrates immense affection for her students and favours a particular group of girls she calls the “Brodie set”. She finds herself at odds with the more rule-abiding Headmistress (Celia Johnson), and also is involved in a tempestuous love triangle with the steady-headed music teacher, Gordon Lowther (Gordon Jackson) and the prurient art teacher Teddy Lloyd (Robert Stephens). As the school years progress, concern starts to arise about Jean Brodie’s teachings as her pupils start to behave in erratic and fanatical ways…
Yes, before Downton Abbey, before Harry Potter, before Gosford Park, The Secret Garden, Hook, Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun, Dame Maggie Smith won an Oscar. In fact, before all of these acting credits, she won two, nabbing a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for California Suite (a film only worth watching for the scenes between her and Sir Michael Caine).
One of the most celebrated and beloved members of British acting royalty alongside Judi Dench, Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart, Maggie had become a notable name in Hollywood long before any of her contemporaries despite being far better known for her more recent participation in Downton and Potter. Only Angela Lansbury (whom we recently wrote about) could rival such longevity.
Maggie had appeared in various films since the mid-’50s with some big stars of the time (Peter Ustinov, Anne Bancroft, Laurence Olivier, to name a few). But her theatre credits were even more phenomenal, having worked with the likes of Olivier, Peter Shaffer, Ned Sherrin and Kenneth Williams from a young age and become a fixture at the Old Vic and the National Theatre. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, one of her earliest leading roles in a movie, put her name on the international map.
I went into this film expecting some sort of feel-good, snarkily comedic school-based comedy in a similar vein to St Trinians or an early form of Bend It Like Beckham or Calendar Girls. I didn’t do my research properly and fully expected the story to be about a young, progressive schoolteacher rising up against the oppressive conservatism of a stuffy old Headmistress in a time long associated with rebellion and questioning social norms.
How wrong I was. This film, though neither violent nor outrightly horrifying, is darker and more thoughtfully so than I expected. And the titular Miss Jean Brodie is an absolute monster. She begins sympathetically. She’s warm and maternal and inspirational towards her students. She provides impassioned speeches about seeing the beauty of the world outside the schoolroom and fighting for what is right. She elicits laughter from the viewer when she snarkily fends off the advances of two male teachers and cheers when she stands up against the interruptions of the suspicious Headmistress (Celia Johnson, absolutely brilliant).
But as the film progresses, our opinion of Miss Jean Brodie changes. Her speeches start to involve projectors showing images of Mussolini and Franco, and she speaks of them as if they are heroes, noble revolutionaries saving the world from some obscure, nameless evil. She rants in favour of them to the point where she is almost in tears, perhaps even orgasming over her adoration for them. Then there is her waxing lyrical about the beauty of Renaissance Italian art. She has lengthy soliloquys about Canaletto and the Mona Lisa but it becomes slowly apparent that she doesn’t know much about them at all. Her speeches are deceptively insipid, rife with platitudes about how much one should be consumed by the beauty of a famous painting. But why should we be consumed? Why is it beautiful? Why does she like it? Jean conspicuously never delves into these questions. She’s fanatical, unquestioning and she bloody loves fascism. Suddenly that stuffy old Headmistress is not so stuffy…
Her world unravels through the actions of her students. One of them has an affair with the very art teacher who pursues Jean amorously. One, so blindly idolising Jean Brodie, runs away to fight for Franco in Spain and is swiftly killed, an event which upsets Jean but for which she accepts no culpability whatsoever. And finally, one student starts to see Jean for who she is, and rebels against her…
What Smith ostensibly brings to the role is the energy and snarky campiness one can expect from her but what makes this such a deserved Oscar win is the fact that Smith skilfully draws us in to her character, at first enjoying her and her monologues and putdowns, but gradually coming to loathe and fear her, much like the charismatic but dangerous fascists that she admires so ardently (interestingly, Hitler is one fascist that Jean never mentioned. Perhaps the writers felt this one was a little too close to the bone).
Doug and I had a conversation after the film about what it was really about. While Jean Brodie is enjoyable and the character work is some of the most effervescent since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, it took us a little while to fully digest the story. I think this is a tale pretty much about the charisma of leaders, and how it can suck one in because what they sounds beautiful and inspirational but when you look beneath the surface you discover either banality, lies, or violence.
It’s a message that suits any time really. In the ‘30s, Europe was taken in by various dictators spouting their hatred and connecting with the zeitgeist. The time of the film’s release, though a time of great things like the evolution of popular music and the Civil Rights Movement, was also a time of destructively radical figures such as Mao, Kim Il Sung, Charles Manson and Jim Jones. And even now we have an ex-US President who continues to say all the racist, xenophobic, conspiracy theory lies that some people love to hear. What the members of Jean Brodie’s “set” come to realise is that they must always question their teachers and their leaders.
Maggie Smith is magnificent in my opinion and it’s a joy to see her younger self (I feel like she’s been in her 60s and above for 50 years). But Pamela Franklin as Sandy, the member of Brodie’s set who goes through the most character development and turns against Brodie is also brilliant. The final showdown between the two of them is dramatic and satisfyingly cathartic.
Nothing at all really. I very much enjoyed this film.
As Paul says, this is not the film you think it is going to be. I’ve grown up with my mum occasionally quoting the line ‘nay, girls are the creme de la creme’, so I thought I was in for a fluffy Sunday afternoon treat. How wrong we were.
It’s not a film I enjoyed massively, because ‘enjoy’ is the wrong word. I think because I was so invested in the idea of a lovely Sunday afternoon film, I was upended by this rather shadowy tale of a hidden Fascist, pouring nastiness into young ears and refusing to acknowledge the damage of her actions. Even the scenes where she encourages while pushing away her two lovers show her to be wilful and unbalanced, but because Smith is so good (and she is terrific), we don’t recognise this behaviour immediately.
It feels insidious. Very slowly (and I think I was slower than I should have been), I started to question this unreliable heroine. She pushes one girl to have an affair with the art teacher, purely because she thinks the girl is the most beautiful. She tells another (who is burning with anger and passion) that she is dull and trustworthy. She inspires one to go off to war and then refuses to take on any responsibility for her death. It’s wildly over the top and somehow also very subtly done.
Props must go to Smith’s co-actors Celia Johnson and Pamela Franklin who match her toe-to-toe throughout this slow-burner. There were some scenes which dragged for me a bit, particularly the ones where Jean is staying at her rich lover’s house, and overall I found it a bit bewildering. It’s a very odd film - and one that I don’t know how I feel about.
The talents of Smith, Johnson and Franklin are undeniable and it’s terrific to see three women leading a film in this way.
It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve seen it, and I still don’t know what this film is really about. It’s unsettling - but I think it should be clearer.
Mark
6/10
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