La primavera de una solterona

I don't know about you, but every time I see Maggie Smith on the screen it's always a good sign to stick around for the whole movie. It holds true with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. A rather slow-moving, at first, and quiet movie, it has a certain seductiveness to it that's just below the surface. As you watch the movie you can almost feel and see the emotions building up. Always at the edge and never missing a beat, Smith executes her role with absolute perfection and in doing so driving the audience insane. Pamela Franklin also comes through as a girl changes Miss Brodie's outlook on her and changes our outlook on Miss Brodie. Torn between rooting for her and hating her, and mostly you'll be doing the latter, Miss Brodie is a character with far less facets to her than one might expect. Only once again proving that trust can be misplaced and appearances can be deceiving.

This movie is often billed as a 'one-woman show', a study of an extraordinary character, Miss Jean Brodie, played by an excellent actress. However, the movie is much more than that. It is a study of charisma and influence, of teachers and students, and presents a complex and fascinating coming-of-age story. This study takes place through the movie's double-focus on both Jean Brodie and her most precocious student, Sandy. Sandy is the strongest and most independent of Miss Brodie's students, and eventually she rebels and rejects her teaching completely. However, she is also truest to her teacher's expressed goals. Miss Brodie supposedly wants to teach 'her girls' to be like herself: powerful, independent individuals, free from the shackles of authority and group-think, beyond conventional sexual morality. In fact, she preys on the weakness and insecurity of her students, punishes independence and rewards slavish loyalty to her and to her personal plans and ideals. (The film's more subtle concern with fascism and authoritarianism echoes this theme: fascism elevates great individuals and praises their strength, just as it demands total obedience and slavishness from the rest.) Sandy, by recognizing and rejecting Miss Brodies's actions and plans, becomes her truest student: not only sexually adventurous, but bold, independent, and confrontational. The final scenes illustrate this beautifully. Miss Brodie has truly put "an old head" on Sandy's "young shoulders", and she truly is "hers for life"--though not in the way originally intended. In this way the movie presents a profound, sophisticated and realistic account of the way powerful individuals influence one another.

Maggie Smith was already a major star in her native England and 4 years before she had earned an Oscar nomination in the supporting category for her Desdemona in "Othello" with Laurence Olivier but her Jean Brodie arrived to revolutionize everything, specially her own career. She won an Oscar and her win was considered one of the great upsets in the Academy's history. Watching The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie 48 years after its original release, told me that the Academy got it right then. Her performance is, quite simply, extraordinary. She's not playing a regular human being, no, she's playing a sort of benign monster, full of good intentions but, goodness, she's mad, mad as a hatter and from that point of view, she's truly dangerous. Maggie Smith goes for it, body and soul, Her confrontation of her superior, played magnificently by Celia Johnson, is of such power that I had to rewind immediately and see it again once, twice, three times. Superlative.

I saw this film thirty years ago and Maggie Smith's performance still rates as one of the finest on screen. The storyline is already well known. I just want to crow about her presence in the movie. This woman even managed to blush when she and Mr Lloyd were caught in a clinch by Mary MacGregor! All these years later I still recall the line she delivered so witheringly when she heard that the music teacher she had once been linked with was finally going the marry the science teacher "Do you not think that with one snap of my fingers I couldn't send Miss (beat) Lockhart back to her gaseous domain!" Rent the video and whoop with delight at the sheer brilliance of this woman.

Robert Stephens was the least convincing of the lead performers, beside his then wife he was positively wooden. I saw them together on the London Stage in Hedda Gabler and they electrified the place! This film though was all about her. Her scenes with the Head Teacher were astonishing " I didn't want to be late - or early!"

A joy!

This is my favourite movie ever. It's made 19 years before I was born, but I don't care. I quite started crying after I'd seen this movie... Maggie Smith may be as old as my grandfather, whatever. She's the most wonderful actress ever... Oh, for heaven's sake, if ever someone deserved an Oscar...

What more can I say? Miss Jean Brodie is a dangerous, hypocrite and narcistic woman, and yet you like her. You have to like her. When you watch the movie, you know she's a facist, and you know that what she preaches is rubbish, but you just do not caze. Miss Brodie stands for "art, beauty and truth" and you just feel she's just deceived and too progressive for her time. But, as Sandy says it in the end of the movie, she is "a dangerous woman". Yet I love her.

And I love Maggie Smith. Dear Dame Maggie, if you ever read this, you are just... so... damn... bloody... great.

Oh for heaven's sake... go and watch this movie.