Directed by Ronald Neame
Maggie Smith, Pamela Franklin
Jean Brodie: Little girls! I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.
Long before she was the tart-tongued Victorian dowager on Downton Abbey, Maggie Smith was the free-spirited, opinionated, and sexy Miss Jean Brodie, a teacher intent on molding her favorite pupils into "Brodie Girls." Miss Brodie is proud to be in her "prime," a modern 20th century woman enamored of modern 20th century heroes - like Francisco Franco and Benito Mussolini. Robert Stephens and Gordon Jackson play Miss Brodie's married and unmarried lovers, and Pamela Franklin is Sandy, the student Jean Brodie badly underestimates. This film could be mistaken, at first, for a boilerplate fable of young people motivated by an unconventional teacher, but it quickly becomes a more complex study of youthful eyes opening to the darker side of the spell a gifted teacher can cast.
CinemaLit Films
