Having grown restless in my latter years of school, this story of a passionately inspiring teacher, and the impact she has on the lives of her pupils, was like a tonic (not that I didn’t comprehend Jean Brodie’s dangerous influence). And the characters were Scottish, like me. Nearly fifty years after the film’s first release (2018 is the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie has lost none of its power. It remains my favourite film.

Muriel Camberg was born in Edinburgh in 1918. When she was nineteen, she moved to Southern Rhodesia to marry Sydney Oswald Spark, whom she had met in Scotland. They had a son, Robin, but Sydney proved to be dangerously unstable and Spark subsequently returned to the United Kingdom on her own in 1944 (her relationship with her son, who returned a year later, would be strained throughout her life). From a young age, Spark was recognised for her excellence as a poet. Back in Britain, she continued to write poetry while she also worked, after a wartime position at the British Foreign Office, in the publishing world as a literary critic and editor. In 1951 Spark won a short story award run by the Observer newspaper, but it was not until 1957 that she published her first novel, The Comforters. In the early 1960s, Spark moved to New York, where she was an admired figure in literary society (The New Yorker provided her with office space in which to work). Later that decade, Spark, ever the exiled Scot, relocated to Italy, where she would live until her death in 2006.

Muriel Spark (Library of Otago, Wikimedia Commons)Of the twenty-two novels that Spark would ultimately publish, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the best known and most loved. The Scottish Review of Books, in its recent Spark centenary issue, pronounced it to be ‘the greatest Scottish novel of the twentieth century’. It was inspired by Spark’s school years and, in particular, by a fascinating teacher, Miss Christina Kay. Set in the early 1930s, it tells of a charismatic teacher at Edinburgh’s conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and of her special group of girls, ‘the Brodie set’. Firmly in her prime, as Miss Brodie frequently declares, she is adored by both Mr Lloyd, the art master, and Mr Lowther, the music teacher; worshipped by her girls; and disliked by the rest of the staff, most particularly the headmistress, Miss Mackay, partly on account of Brodie’s students ‘being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorised curriculum … and useless to the school as a school’.

Such was the popularity of Spark’s novel that, in 1966, the American screenwriter Jay Presson Allen adapted the book into a play, which was staged in London (with Vanessa Redgrave in the lead role) and, two years later, on Broadway (Zoë Caldwell). Allen wrote the script of the 1969 film, which was superbly directed by Ronald Neame. Maggie Smith won an Academy Award for her magnificent portrayal of the eccentric mentor. Upon reading the book for the first time a number of years after watching the film, I found it remarkable that many of the lines I knew by heart were already there in Spark’s concise novel (though the scalpel of wit that Spark deploys to depict human fallibility is even sharper in book form). What is equally remarkable is how Allen retained the story’s essence while synthesising it so skilfully for the screen.

The film opens with an overhead shot of the rooftops of Edinburgh in 1932, and quickly focuses on Jean Brodie as she leaves her flat and mounts her bicycle to ride to school. Maggie Smith, who was in her mid-thirties then, is strikingly beautiful and, with her strawberry blonde hair and impeccable dress, she is an alluring figure. Neame emphasises this cinematically by washing the school set in institutional grey, a colour which is also picked up by the children’s sea of grey uniforms, and against which the bold hues preferred by Miss Brodie stand out. Gradually, we meet each of the other main characters as they convene at Marcia Blaine for the start of a new school year: Mr Lloyd (Robert Stephens, Smith’s then husband), Mr Lowther (Gordon Jackson), the four girls of the Brodie set – Sandy (an exceptional Pamela Franklin), Jenny (Diane Grayson), Monica (Shirley Steedman), and Mary Macgregor (Jane Carr); and the headmistress Miss Mackay (Celia Johnson, as a worthy nemesis to Miss Brodie). The director wastes no time in getting to Miss Brodie’s classroom, where the story’s principal themes and the characters’ personalities are brilliantly, humorously established.

After introducing two new pupils (including the attractively mouldable Mary Macgregor) and delivering her ‘old heads on young shoulders’ speech, Miss Brodie tells the class of pre-teens that she has summered in Italy, assuring them, ‘I am truly in my prime’. When she asks the girls who is the greatest Italian painter and they nominate ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, she corrects them – Giotto ‘is my favourite’. Proceeding to pin a Giotto reproduction over a portrait of ex-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, which is inscribed with the headmistress- approved slogan ‘Safety First!’, Miss Brodie informs her girls of the falsity of this claim, declaring: ‘Safety does not come first. Goodness, truth, and beauty come first.’

Enunciating these sentiments in her distinctive Scottish accent, while elegantly attired in a slim-fitting maroon dress and a vibrant red scarf, Miss Brodie is clearly a romantic figure for her pupils. This early scene, which culminates in comic farce as Miss Brodie rhapsodises about her lost love, Hugh, who ‘fell on Flanders Field’, immediately establishes the captivating hold she has on her girls (and on men), but also her vanity and the enmity between her and the headmistress. Miss Brodie’s misguided political sympathies – her admiration for Mussolini (‘the greatest Roman of them all’) and for Franco – will reveal themselves soon enough. It is these elements and their repercussions on the characters’ lives that are the driving forces of this humorous, stirring, tragic story.

The Prime follows this particular Brodie set through their secondary school years. They attend class, but also go on outings of ‘enrichment’ with Miss Brodie to Edinburgh’s old town or to Mr Lowther’s estate at Cramond, where the girls invent scenarios of the two teachers’ sexual affair. They are also introduced to the studio of Teddy Lloyd. The girls quickly realise that the married art teacher is Miss Brodie’s true love. These interactions are conduits to their understanding and the film (like the book) is a warm, funny representation of young girls’ burgeoning awareness of sex. It captures their naïveté, curiosity, and trepidation, such as when Sandy and Jenny discuss, over tea and toasted buns, how their parents ‘don’t have primes’; ‘they have sexual intercourse’, adding perplexedly: ‘you’d think that the urge would have passed by the time they got their clothes off’.

While the scenes with her male admirers/lovers are integral to The Prime, it is Miss Brodie’s conversations and confrontations with other strong-willed women, most notably her ‘dependable’ student Sandy and Miss Mackay that are most powerful. Honouring the complexity of the character created by Spark, such interactions show the incredible passion Miss Brodie has for education. She expresses with emotion to Miss Mackay that she wants her girls to experience ‘all the possibilities of life’, and cautions her set that ‘you must always remember you are citizens of Edinburgh. City of Hume and Boswell. You are Europeans. Not dowdy provincials.’ And yet, the portrayal is not as simple as that. Aside from her alarming political sympathies, Miss Brodie manipulates her girls into roles of her choosing, thereby limiting the ‘possibilities’ she professes to offer. This short-sighted egotism will ultimately lead to Miss Brodie’s betrayal.

The filmmakers’ skill, like Spark’s, is that the viewer still admires Miss Brodie. Watching The Prime after all these years only amplifies my belief in the kind of passionate, life-enhancing education that this curious teacher embodies, irrespective of her vanity and harmful influence. This is Spark’s great gift: she revels in the fullness and contradictoriness of individual lives; she recognises the peculiarities in each of her characters and dissects them, clearly and coldly, but she does not minimise them or accept them as easily explainable. Neame’s warm and wonderful film similarly celebrates this individual complexity, as it raises the challenges of moral choice, from its opening shots to its moving closing scene.