The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

As a teacher — liked, respected and idolized by her students — she is enormously influential, and she knows it, she feeds on it:

I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders… Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.

To a point, her power is awesome for a woman in 1932, and one wants to see that confidence and sense of possibility conferred to a younger generation. Brodie imagines herself a revolutionary in a school desperately ’staying the same to the point of pretrification.’ She prefers to let Goodness, Truth and Beauty be her guide — abstracts she mistakes for absolutes. For her, ‘education is a leading out’ rather than an intrusion; it’s experiential, cultural, personal.

But as her jilted lover Teddy questions her, is she a teacher or a leader? Jean Brodie is not content to show her adoring pupils what they could be; she attempts to mold them into what she believes they ought to be. Believing she and each of her girls share a ’spiritual bond,’ she sizes them up and defines them. They must be glamorous and refined, cultured and heroic. Her position depends completely upon their idolatry and loyalty, and she has it: they will be what she wants them to become.

Having devoted her prime to these girls, Jean Brodie believes she has made an enormous sacrifice. Despite her radicalism she remains committed to propriety and duty; she denies her own needs and desires, projecting her self onto her impressionable girls. “Jenny will be painted many times in years to come,” she decides; “Jenny will be famous for sex.” Jenny will be to Teddy what she cannot, but this is nearly enough for her, so thoroughly has she conflated her identity with that of her students.

If she had pursued her love for Teddy — though it be scandalous — she might have been fulfilled herself. If she had sought to articulate a different view, rather than indoctrinate, her students might have been truly enlightened.

“You will always be Brodie girls,” Jean promises them with real affection, belying the threat and truth in her words. They all are, even Sandy in her ultimate rejection of Brodie, the product of her misled, driving passions.

The film is deeply absorbing, moving easily but unexpectedly between delightful coming-of-age dramedy and palpable psychological horror. There is a combination of naivete and power and unshakable moral righteousness in Brodie that I do find truly, physically horrific. All at once, I’m captivated and repelled by this woman, just as her girls are — and I suppose I feel it all the more strongly as a young female student who has noted her own dangerous predisposition to idolize and emulate teachers.

Maggie Smith cannot possibly be overrated in this film — every movement conveys Brodie’s self-aware and determined performance, every glance burns with Brodie’s consuming and crippling passion. She makes Jean Brodie so immensely likeable that it becomes almost impossible to acknowledge the truly monstrous in her. It ranks with the greatest of all time, in my opinion, and truly has to be seen to be believed.