The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (film)

18/11/2025

Miscellaneous    Download PDF  
While Ronald Neame’s film can appear like a faithful adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel (via the play by Jay Presson Allen), it both changes the emphasis and also changes the form. While the book is chiefly about religion, with education, sex, and politics secondary in an intricate atemporal weave, the film is a chronological account that emphasizes education, sex, and politics in a more orderly fashion. It makes little of the religious except as a general, moralising element in the school environment. In Spark’s novel, she uses the theological as the experimental, suggesting a Calvinist predestination when she chooses to tell us about the characters’ lives as though the author herself has second sight. Calvinism, after all, proposes that “by predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation.” (‘Institutes of the Christian Religion’) Spark makes much of this in the book, with one of the pupils, Sandy, thinking near the end that the central, titular schoolteacher, “thinks she is Providence…she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end.”
There is a twofold irony in the book:for much of it, the narrator has been providential indeed, with numerous examples of prolepsis, as the novel, flashing forward, provides information a novelist usually withholds until much later in the story. We hear for example that just as Mary MacGregor is introduced as a young girl that she will die at 23 in a fire; that Sandy (Pamela Franklin) will go on to become a nun, and that another of her students will twenty-eight years in the future think back, to many years earlier, when one of the pupils betrayed Brodie (Maggie Smith) and led the teacher to losing her job.
Whether we admire the intricacy of Spark’s telling or are responsive to the theological elements of predestination meeting the narrative techniques of the proleptic, what we can say with some confidence is that the film doesn’t take advantage of film techniques developed in the decade in which the film was made. By the mid-sixties, it was common for directors to manipulate time in complex ways. A flashback could be motivated by a sound cue or a visual detail rather than a character’s recollections. A film could anticipate future events by including within a scene sounds that would be heard in a later one, or a sound that would carry across several moments. A visual cue in Hiroshima, mon amour allows us momentarily to begin comprehending a woman’s past in France as she sees, in Japan, her Japanese lover in bed: his arm suggests her ex’s, and the film cuts to this German soldier. In Point Blank, the central character is walking along a corridor, and the sound of his footsteps continues into the following scenes until we hear him breaking in on his ex-wife. The footsteps capture very well the determination the character shows in getting revenge on the various people he believes have wronged him.
There were clearly techniques in place for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to be a more radical film, matching the temporally complex elements in the novel. Instead, Neame offers an adaptation indicative of the book’s conservative theme rather than its more challenging content. By making the film chronological, it loses the provocative idea that narrative can play God with characters’ lives, one that very few writers admit. While Spark’s book moves forward and backward as the narrator provides details according to perverse manipulation, rather than narrative momentum, the film offers three consecutive time frames, making it closer to the three-act play that shows the influence of the theatrical adaptation rather than the book.
In the first, the children are ending primary school and will soon no longer be taught by Brodie. They will still be in the same institution, however, and that early influence will continue through the next six years. As Brodie says, “give me a child at an impressionable age and I will make her mine for life”, in a variation of Ignatius’s claim: “Give me the child until seven and I will show you the man.” The combination of youthful impressionability and Brodie’s continuing close approximation means that the influence is enormous and surely negates Brodie’s claims concerning education. In the book, she discusses it with the girls; in the film, it becomes a confrontation between the headmistress, MacKay (Celia Johnson), and Brodie. The content remains, more or less, the same: Brodie is interested in education, Mackay, in intrusion. Education, Brodie states, comes from the Latin for leading out or bringing forth. Intrusion means to thrust or push. Brodie believes that she allows the students to find themselves educationally; Miss Mackay expects them to absorb lots of information. Brodie’s is a variation of Socrates’s maieutics, which takes latent ideas and makes them manifest.  Mackay is closer to Dickens’ Gradgrind: with facts, maths, and the measurable mattering more..
Yet over the course of the film, Brodie’s downfall will rest less on her suspect educational techniques, ones that show beauty, taste, and judgement are all very well, but only one opinion counts, than on her own intrusiveness, her own thrusting in. It is all very well when Brodie asks one of the girls who the most important Italian painter is, and the pupil offers Leonardo da Vinci. But Brodie says it is the wrong answer. The right one is Giotto: “He is my favourite.” This is merely troublesome, a teacher who educates with personal opinion and wants to formulate taste rather than convey information. However, it isn’t quite seen as catastrophic, and she can’t be removed from her post. After all, the kids adore her and she has tenureship. It would have to take a betrayal from a pupil to have her sacked, and this is exactly what eventually happens when the most significant of the girls, Sandy, has had enough.
Why? We should remember the film covers the 1930s, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, and the Spanish Civil War near the end of the decade. Long an admirer of Mussolini, Brodie also now admires Franco and manages to persuade Mary MacGregor (in the film, another character in the book) to fight for the Francoist cause. After all, her brother is already out there, the one relative the poor orphan girl possesses, and why wouldn’t she wish to be by his side? The problem we discover and that Sandy throws back at Brodie is that Mary’s brother wasn’t fighting the Falangists but for the Republicans. Brother and sister would have ended up fighting each other. Mary ends up dead in Spain before that happens, and Sandy knows Brodie has to be stopped. Her educational approach hasn’t been a bringing forth but a horrible thrusting in. As Sandy has been growing up and becoming her own woman, she sees, through a combination of factors, that Brodie isn’t a heroic believer in beauty and love but an aging narcissist who manipulates those around her all the better to protect her ego.
This brings in the sex. Brodie loves the art teacher Teddy Lloyd, but Lloyd is a married Catholic with half a dozen children, so she plays with the affections of another teacher, Lowther, who ends up marrying someone else. Brodie is alone, but unable to confront her loneliness, it  seems, and it takes some hard truths from both Lloyd and Sandy for her facade to crumble. Lloyd confronts her over her dubious politics; Sandy doesn’t just get her sacked, she also tells Brodie that she has been sleeping with Teddy. Brodie is shocked. Not especially because he has cheated and slept with one of his pupils. It is more because he has cheated with the wrong one. Brodie expected the prettiest to become his lover. Instead, it was not one of her choosing. It is failed hubris as the children she could claim at an impressionable age haven’t all been quite as impressionable in the end.
In the book, events don’t conclude there; the novel jumps forward to the future and, for example, a moment when the teacher meets Sandy after the war, where “Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long-preserved dark musquash coat.” At last, she admits, “I am past my prime.” This comes a third of the way through the book and potentially removes any pathos that might have been available had Spark’s novel concluded on such a scene. Yet if the book often endangers feeling, through the insistence of its form, the film’s lack of formal innovation ensures a competent telling, but not much by way of revelation. Spark’s book remains important for its theological impositions, for its interlinking of the theological and the narratological, and the idea that storytelling needs to invigorate itself by provocation. While writers in the fifties and sixties like Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet and others in France were insisting on removing aspects of the story, turning temporal progression into spatial stasis as descriptions became endless, and even removing letters from the alphabet (Perec wrote a novel without the letter e), Spark aptly drew on the religious preoccupations of her culture: a predestination that perhaps like Sandy she eventually managed to escape. Spark converted to Roman Catholicism, went to live in Italy, and as her biographer Alan Taylor proposed: “For Muriel […] Scotland was too small, too inward-looking, too mindful of other people’s business, too mean-spirited, too unreceptive to the wider world.” (‘Appointment in Arezzo: A friendship with Muriel Spark’) Much of the book’s appeal resides in capturing this element of Scottish culture while using its Calvinist aspect to bring innovation to Scottish fiction. It remains a modestly important book, while the film is only now remembered for the clipped, crisp cadences of Maggie Smith’s commanding and commandeering performance as Miss Brodie.
 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (film)

While Ronald Neame’s film can appear like a faithful adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel (via the play by Jay Presson Allen), it both changes the emphasis and also changes the form. While the book is chiefly about religion, with education, sex, and politics secondary in an intricate atemporal weave, the film is a chronological account that emphasizes education, sex, and politics in a more orderly fashion. It makes little of the religious except as a general, moralising element in the school environment. In Spark’s novel, she uses the theological as the experimental, suggesting a Calvinist predestination when she chooses to tell us about the characters’ lives as though the author herself has second sight. Calvinism, after all, proposes that “by predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation.” (‘Institutes of the Christian Religion’) Spark makes much of this in the book, with one of the pupils, Sandy, thinking near the end that the central, titular schoolteacher, “thinks she is Providence…she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end.”
There is a twofold irony in the book:for much of it, the narrator has been providential indeed, with numerous examples of prolepsis, as the novel, flashing forward, provides information a novelist usually withholds until much later in the story. We hear for example that just as Mary MacGregor is introduced as a young girl that she will die at 23 in a fire; that Sandy (Pamela Franklin) will go on to become a nun, and that another of her students will twenty-eight years in the future think back, to many years earlier, when one of the pupils betrayed Brodie (Maggie Smith) and led the teacher to losing her job.
Whether we admire the intricacy of Spark’s telling or are responsive to the theological elements of predestination meeting the narrative techniques of the proleptic, what we can say with some confidence is that the film doesn’t take advantage of film techniques developed in the decade in which the film was made. By the mid-sixties, it was common for directors to manipulate time in complex ways. A flashback could be motivated by a sound cue or a visual detail rather than a character’s recollections. A film could anticipate future events by including within a scene sounds that would be heard in a later one, or a sound that would carry across several moments. A visual cue in Hiroshima, mon amour allows us momentarily to begin comprehending a woman’s past in France as she sees, in Japan, her Japanese lover in bed: his arm suggests her ex’s, and the film cuts to this German soldier. In Point Blank, the central character is walking along a corridor, and the sound of his footsteps continues into the following scenes until we hear him breaking in on his ex-wife. The footsteps capture very well the determination the character shows in getting revenge on the various people he believes have wronged him.
There were clearly techniques in place for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to be a more radical film, matching the temporally complex elements in the novel. Instead, Neame offers an adaptation indicative of the book’s conservative theme rather than its more challenging content. By making the film chronological, it loses the provocative idea that narrative can play God with characters’ lives, one that very few writers admit. While Spark’s book moves forward and backward as the narrator provides details according to perverse manipulation, rather than narrative momentum, the film offers three consecutive time frames, making it closer to the three-act play that shows the influence of the theatrical adaptation rather than the book.
In the first, the children are ending primary school and will soon no longer be taught by Brodie. They will still be in the same institution, however, and that early influence will continue through the next six years. As Brodie says, “give me a child at an impressionable age and I will make her mine for life”, in a variation of Ignatius’s claim: “Give me the child until seven and I will show you the man.” The combination of youthful impressionability and Brodie’s continuing close approximation means that the influence is enormous and surely negates Brodie’s claims concerning education. In the book, she discusses it with the girls; in the film, it becomes a confrontation between the headmistress, MacKay (Celia Johnson), and Brodie. The content remains, more or less, the same: Brodie is interested in education, Mackay, in intrusion. Education, Brodie states, comes from the Latin for leading out or bringing forth. Intrusion means to thrust or push. Brodie believes that she allows the students to find themselves educationally; Miss Mackay expects them to absorb lots of information. Brodie’s is a variation of Socrates’s maieutics, which takes latent ideas and makes them manifest.  Mackay is closer to Dickens’ Gradgrind: with facts, maths, and the measurable mattering more..
Yet over the course of the film, Brodie’s downfall will rest less on her suspect educational techniques, ones that show beauty, taste, and judgement are all very well, but only one opinion counts, than on her own intrusiveness, her own thrusting in. It is all very well when Brodie asks one of the girls who the most important Italian painter is, and the pupil offers Leonardo da Vinci. But Brodie says it is the wrong answer. The right one is Giotto: “He is my favourite.” This is merely troublesome, a teacher who educates with personal opinion and wants to formulate taste rather than convey information. However, it isn’t quite seen as catastrophic, and she can’t be removed from her post. After all, the kids adore her and she has tenureship. It would have to take a betrayal from a pupil to have her sacked, and this is exactly what eventually happens when the most significant of the girls, Sandy, has had enough.
Why? We should remember the film covers the 1930s, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, and the Spanish Civil War near the end of the decade. Long an admirer of Mussolini, Brodie also now admires Franco and manages to persuade Mary MacGregor (in the film, another character in the book) to fight for the Francoist cause. After all, her brother is already out there, the one relative the poor orphan girl possesses, and why wouldn’t she wish to be by his side? The problem we discover and that Sandy throws back at Brodie is that Mary’s brother wasn’t fighting the Falangists but for the Republicans. Brother and sister would have ended up fighting each other. Mary ends up dead in Spain before that happens, and Sandy knows Brodie has to be stopped. Her educational approach hasn’t been a bringing forth but a horrible thrusting in. As Sandy has been growing up and becoming her own woman, she sees, through a combination of factors, that Brodie isn’t a heroic believer in beauty and love but an aging narcissist who manipulates those around her all the better to protect her ego.
This brings in the sex. Brodie loves the art teacher Teddy Lloyd, but Lloyd is a married Catholic with half a dozen children, so she plays with the affections of another teacher, Lowther, who ends up marrying someone else. Brodie is alone, but unable to confront her loneliness, it  seems, and it takes some hard truths from both Lloyd and Sandy for her facade to crumble. Lloyd confronts her over her dubious politics; Sandy doesn’t just get her sacked, she also tells Brodie that she has been sleeping with Teddy. Brodie is shocked. Not especially because he has cheated and slept with one of his pupils. It is more because he has cheated with the wrong one. Brodie expected the prettiest to become his lover. Instead, it was not one of her choosing. It is failed hubris as the children she could claim at an impressionable age haven’t all been quite as impressionable in the end.
In the book, events don’t conclude there; the novel jumps forward to the future and, for example, a moment when the teacher meets Sandy after the war, where “Miss Brodie sat shrivelled and betrayed in her long-preserved dark musquash coat.” At last, she admits, “I am past my prime.” This comes a third of the way through the book and potentially removes any pathos that might have been available had Spark’s novel concluded on such a scene. Yet if the book often endangers feeling, through the insistence of its form, the film’s lack of formal innovation ensures a competent telling, but not much by way of revelation. Spark’s book remains important for its theological impositions, for its interlinking of the theological and the narratological, and the idea that storytelling needs to invigorate itself by provocation. While writers in the fifties and sixties like Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet and others in France were insisting on removing aspects of the story, turning temporal progression into spatial stasis as descriptions became endless, and even removing letters from the alphabet (Perec wrote a novel without the letter e), Spark aptly drew on the religious preoccupations of her culture: a predestination that perhaps like Sandy she eventually managed to escape. Spark converted to Roman Catholicism, went to live in Italy, and as her biographer Alan Taylor proposed: “For Muriel […] Scotland was too small, too inward-looking, too mindful of other people’s business, too mean-spirited, too unreceptive to the wider world.” (‘Appointment in Arezzo: A friendship with Muriel Spark’) Much of the book’s appeal resides in capturing this element of Scottish culture while using its Calvinist aspect to bring innovation to Scottish fiction. It remains a modestly important book, while the film is only now remembered for the clipped, crisp cadences of Maggie Smith’s commanding and commandeering performance as Miss Brodie.
 

© Tony McKibbin