Thursday, March 30, 2017

MAKING A MEMORY: CINEMA & THE CULT OF LONGING

In this photo by Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco Chronicle photographer Joe Rosenthal (of Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima fame), the marquee for The Castro Theater advertises the double-feature It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Far From The Madding CrowdI saw this very double feature at the Castro (a real butt-buster, if ever there was one) in January of 1971.

In Walt Disney's The Parent Trap (the good one with Hayley Mills), there's a scene where the twin raised in California greets her Boston grandfather (Charles Ruggles) for the first time. As they embrace, Susan (Mills), prolonging the hug, buries her face in the lapels of the old man's jacket.
Grandfather: "What are you doing?"
Susan: "Making a memory."
Grandfather: "Making a memory?"
Susan: "All my life...years from now, when I'm quite grown up, I'll remember my grandfather and how he always smelled of (sniffs his lapel again) tobacco and peppermint."

Apart from always giving me a major case of waterworks, this scene fairly sums up for me what moviegoing was like before the days of cable, satellite, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and online streaming. When there was no telling when you'd ever have the opportunity to see a favorite film again, a standard part of the moviegoing experience was learning how to make a memory. Developing skills, rituals, and habits by which one could hold onto the experience of a movie for as long as possible.
A few of the double features I enjoyed at the Castro Theater circa1968-1969

For the devoted film fan, it was practically a survival tactic. By the time I reached my teens, it had become second nature for me to take detailed mental pictures; subconsciously log, file, and catalog significant sequences for later recollection rewind; and keep seismic record of the goosebump moments of every movie I liked. Even on those occasions when I'd sit through a movie twice in one afternoon, the subconscious goal was always the same: to have the film make as indelible an impression as possible on my psyche so that thereafter, the film became "mine." A memory of an experience I could relive and draw upon at will, be it to inspire, lift my spirits, or see me through any number of then-earth-shattering adolescent crises.
I fell in love with movies in the late '60s, back when there were only three TV networks, and movies could take as long as two years to reach the TV screen. Then, lacking the technology allowing one to watch and rewatch a beloved movie in the comfort of one's home—ad nauseam, ad infinitum, to the point of torpor—one had to rely on extended memory. Deprived of having the easily-referenced details of a film at our fingertips (not to mention the demythologizing, demystifying, explain-every-subtlety-and-detail contribution of DVD commentary tracks), the memory of movies were all you had. And even then, often only in the form of fractured recall, personal reminiscence, and hazy, emotion-diffused impressions of the sort that made it easy to misquote and misremember entire scenes.
Ultimately, all of this goes to explain the origins of my subjective/emotional philosophy of cinema: In lieu of being able to possess a film in actual fact, I came to base my love of movies on how they made me feel.
The most coveted (by me) part of the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle was the entertainment "Date Book" section, known to locals as "the "pink pages." Here would be found a host of movie-related articles, as well as information about upcoming releases and premieres. This issue, dated June 16, 1968, mentions the forthcoming release of Rosemary's Baby (my #1 favorite film of all time) at the Century 21 Theater on Wednesday, June 26th.

But even fond memories require the occasional bowl-stirring, so a big part of film fandom for me as a youth involved finding new ways to prolong the moviegoing experience.

For example, my predilection for repeatedly watching the same movie is rooted in the fact that when I was growing up, once a film had completed its initial theatrical run, there was no telling when it would appear again. Back then, revival theaters (those that didn't specialize in underground, foreign, and art films) served the same purpose as TCM today, providing access to classic uncut films like Dinner at Eight & My Little Chickadee from Hollywood's Golden Age. When it came to mainstream releases like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Up The Down Staircase, after their initial release (which was longer then and not so saturated), you had to scan the newspaper movie section waiting for them to reappear on the bottom half of a double or triple bill at some 2nd or 3rd-run neighborhood movie house. Short of that, there was waiting for them to appear on network TV—butchered, censored, and commercial interrupted.
The Stepford Wives (1975) is one of my best-loved films. It had its network television premiere on Sunday, October 24, 1976. I was excited to see it again, but I recall being disappointed (but not altogether surprised) that the ending had been trimmed, muting its overall impact. Having to endure the subtle censorship or total excision of favorite moments in beloved films was a standard part of the old-school "luxury" of having feature films broadcast into your living room.                                                           Image: coolasscinema.com

Since I liked to read, there was always the option of going to the local library and checking out the novels from which some of my favorite films were adapted (I especially liked the movie tie-in paperbacks, which always included loads of stills). A rare and mostly last-ditch effort on my part to keep a movie memory alive was the paperback "novelization"—a marketing device reserved for films adapted from original screenplays. I recall my experience reading the novelization of Thoroughly Modern Millie, mainly in terms of the great pains I took not to let the other boys at school see what I was reading. 
Fake novel / Real Novel
Because I was shy, I always had my nose buried in a book at school. While reading Millie, I dreaded the day (which, mercifully, never came) when one of my classmates would ask me what I was reading, and I'd be forced to witness the color drain from their faces as I summarized its cotton-candy plot. On the other hand, The Sterile Cuckoo got me some unearned points from my English teacher, who misheard it as One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Thereafter, she seldom missed an opportunity to commend me on my reading
"At a high-school level!" (I was eleven) and selecting such heavy material for recreational reading. 


One of the more accessible in-home ways to sustain the excitement of movies (thanks to an older sister who spent substantial hunks of her weekly allowance on issues of Rona Barrett's Hollywood, Movie Mirror, Photoplay, and Silver Screen) was the movie fan magazine. While other kids my age were reading Batman comic books, I was reading about why Liz was too sick to satisfy her man and what new heartbreak The Lennon Sisters were having to endure. Before People magazine and 'round-the-clock "entertainment news" channels convinced folks that non-stop celebrity gossip was actually real news, these mags served their fandom purpose by keeping pop-cultural ephemera where it belonged: on the sidelines amongst the scandal sheets and teen-celebrity magazines.
Screen Stories was my favorite movie magazine because each issue contained
complete, spoiler-filled synopses of all the latest flicks. With pictures!

I eventually gave up raiding my sister's stash of movie gossip rags once I discovered the "serious" movie periodicals section of the library. There, magazines with chi-chi names like Sight and Sound, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, and Films in Review not only fed my adolescent pretensions, but fostered my lifelong love of movie criticism and film analysis. Feeding my equally keen adolescent fondness for looking at pictures of naked men was British-based Films and Filming magazine, a self-billed "sensible magazine for serious film-goers" that was loaded with intelligent film reviews and could always be relied upon to feature the most salacious and homoerotic stills culled from even the most harmless movies.
When it came to helping me convince my parents that all the nudity in those age-inappropriate movies I so wanted to see was actually "artistic" and "significant to the plot," serious film periodicals (doesn't that sound better than movie magazines?) like Films and Filming proved invaluable.

Reading about movies or rewatching them to the point of memorization is all well and good, but those are but mementos of the mind. I don't know of a movie fan worthy of the name who, at some time or another, hasn't longed for some sort of concrete, tangible, take-home token of a film. 
For me, it was through the collecting of movie-themed souvenirs. Not so much when I was very young (because I had to wait for movies to come to the neighborhood theater), but in my teens, through to early adulthood, I loved it when first-run movies would offer some kind of chintzy promotional giveaway to the first 50 to 100 patrons at selected screenings. The thrill of being one of the few to take home a small memento of a movie (not to mention the silent, mean-spirited joy to be had in gloating over empty-handed patrons 101-plus) is what prompted my then-annoying penchant for dragging my friends to theaters way too early, making them stand in long lines (something which I quite enjoyed).
Andy Warhol's BAD opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, April 27, 1977. I didn't see the film until several years later, but at the time, the Music Hall theater sold the BAD T-shirt at the boxoffice. I purchased one for $5 and wore it so often that it disintegrated. The shirt pictured is a knock-off I bought on eBay in the '90s for considerably more than $5.

Over the years, I've sold or donated the bulk of my movie souvenir collection of buttons, T-shirts, banners, and posters, but stashed away somewhere in my apartment, I still have a few items of interest to nobody but me: the pinback button from the opening day of Alien (sounds good, but it's a dull graphic that merely has the words "You Are My Lucky Star" [the song Ripley sings to herself moments before the final attack] printed over a starry background); the sample soundtrack LP handed out at the premiere (and Joan Tewkesbury autograph signing) of the forgotten 1979 Talia Shire film Old Boyfriends; and a poster given out at an early screening of Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon.
Although my original "Pray for Rosemary's Baby" button is the pride of my collection,
I still possess quite a few promotional pinback giveaways 

Another favorite of mine was the souvenir program. Big-budget movies and roadshow attractions traditionally sold "official" souvenir programs at the theater lobby concession stands...right next to the Jujubes and Milk Duds. Crammed with photos and PR puffery, these glossy brochures were little more than glorified pressbooks. But there was no better feeling than coming home from a movie, excited and tired but not wanting the evening to end, settling into bed and reading yourself to sleep while poring over all that prepackaged publicity material, the film replaying on a loop in your head.
Of the many souvenir programs I purchased when these films opened in
 San Francisco in the '70s, these three were my favorites

Pop-art pinup posters were all the rage during the late '60s & '70s. And while I loved having blow-up posters of old-Hollywood movie stars like WC Fields, Marilyn Monroe, and Clark Gable on my bedroom walls (ironic nostalgia was in), my favorites were those of contemporary stars. My prized items were my posters of Peter Fonda on his Easy Rider bike, and a twin set of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton from The Taming of the Shrew.
Liz  & Dick: The "It" couple of my youth graced these individual 
posters. It felt like a crime not to buy them as a pair.

But shyness, concern that my sisters would tease me (and the ultimate fear that my mom wouldn't let me keep them anyway) prevented me from owning the two pinup posters I most wanted and which always caught my eye when I'd walk past the head shops and record stores on San Francisco's Haight Street: Jane Fonda in full Barbarella gear, and one-flop-wonder Ewa Aulin posed provocatively in an airplane cockpit as Candy
Tame by today's standards, these were popular and racy posters in 1968. And only being 10 or 11 at the time, I was certain I had no chance of owning them. It then never occurred to me that my father might have been encouraged as hell to have his quiet, non-athletic, bookworm son post a bit of female pulchritude on his bedroom wall.

It wasn't until I was in high school that I learned civilians could actually purchase the posters, stills, and lobby cards displayed at movie theaters (detailed in my essay The Show Began on the Sidewalk). Thereafter, movie posters remained my preferred, all-time favorite motion picture collectible.
For a time, I kept a scrapbook filled with newspaper ads for the movies I'd seen. The Northpoint Theater in San Francisco was one of my favorite moviegoing venues. I was thrilled to see The Exorcist (1973) and Tommy (1976) when they made their Bay Area debuts there. 


But so far, all the modes of movie memory-making I've covered have been of the visual-aids variety: items that work like sentimental signposts designed to jog my memory along a recollection map whose coordinates and points of reference it remained largely up to me to determine (i.e., they could only trigger memories I'd already backlogged).

Movie soundtrack albums were another thing entirely. I speak not of the soundtrack albums for movie musicals, which are both culturally accessible (the source of many top 40 hits) and require no real affinity for the film itself (e.g., the double platinum LP success of the otherwise flop musical Xanadu). No, I speak of the limited, almost cult-like appeal of the original soundtrack album devoted to the instrumental, chiefly orchestral, musical score composed for a dramatic or comedic film. Not everybody has the stomach for long play records devoted to the non-diegetic (outside-of-story) thrills of background themes, melodic excerpts, and music categorized as incidental or transitional.

Listening to music composed for the express purpose of (imperceptibly) enhancing a film's mood and influencing the viewer's emotional response to images on a screen may not be everyone's taste, but whether it was music for a chase scene, bar fight, suspenseful moment, or comic interlude; for the longest time, motion picture soundtrack albums were the only way to really take a movie home with you.

Some of my happiest memories are of lying on the living room (shag) carpet in front of our wood-paneled TV/Radio/Hi-Fi record player console behemoth (with space for album storage!), listening to soundtrack albums I rented from the public library. Remembering a film is nice—and that's where memorabilia and souvenirs come in—but listening to a movie's soundtrack LP, with eyes closed and headphones on, is more than recollection; it's rediscovery.
By listening to music you most likely felt but never really heard (if the movie did its job of keeping you engrossed), you got to replay and relive a cinema experience in your mind. There's a definite geek element to this method of making a movie memory (the scores to a great many '60s comedies sound like music for a cartoon or bad TV sitcom). But nothing compared to soundtrack albums for their ability to inspire new dreams while revisiting the old.
I don't know if it's true, but it has always felt like I grew up during the golden age of movie music. Theme songs from motion pictures were all over the radio and TV variety programs. My earliest memories of the kind of movie music played around my house are not of movie soundtrack albums, but albums devoted to cover versions of popular songs from movies. My mom had a crush on Tom Jones, and though she played his What's New, Pussycat? album to death, I don't remember a single other song on it.

My dad's crush was on Nancy Wilson, so I often heard this album. It included the songs EVERY popular singer of the time recorded—Moon River, The Days of Wine & Roses, and Alfie—plus the ubiquitous More (theme from Mondo Cane), which to this very day always makes me think of the 1963 film Toys in the AtticYou see, my folks took us with them to a Drive-In movie to see the Dean Martin starrer Toys in the Attic (Dino was another of my mom's crushes...she really had a "type," didn't she?), and it was there that I was traumatized by the trailer for the gross-out shock documentary Mondo Cane.

As much as I loved movies, when I was young, thanks to the proliferation of light classical and easy-listening LPs like these, movie scores carried the stigma of being associated with Muzak and thought of as "elevator music." You really couldn't go anywhere without hearing Lara's Theme from Doctor Zhivago (Somewhere My Love), or the Theme from Moulin Rouge (Where Is Your Heart?).  

Today, I carry these with me on my iPod. Time has been the least forgiving to the soundtrack of Barefoot in the Park (1967)But nothing evokes 1969 San Francisco for me like The Magic Christian soundtrack. Midnight Cowboy is perhaps my favorite complete score of the four. To this date, I've never seen The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom, but when I was 10, I was a fan of The New Vaudeville Band (Winchester Cathedral), so their presence on this LP was enough to make the gamble worthwhile.

TOP 20 Motion Picture Soundtrack Albums
(not a list of the "best" albums - a list of albums that made me happy)


I simply marvel at the many things that technology has made readily available to the modern film buff. Movies can be viewed in laser-sharp Blu-ray within months of their theatrical releases, complete with deleted scenes, alternate endings, informative commentary tracks, and director's cuts. There's untold online access to stills, posters, storyboards, soundtrack cuts (no need to listen to the entire album!), early script drafts, interviews, poster galleries, and all manner of behind-the-scenes trivia and factoids. I could never have imagined even a fraction of all this growing up.
And while I'm sure my 12-year-old self would have been over-the-moon enraptured had any of this been available to me during my formative film fan years, my older and wiser present-self knows better.

I know that my lifetime love affair with movies has always been nurtured by the courtship phase. The anticipation, the counting-the-days-until-release excitement...all followed up by the exquisite agony of wondering when you'll get to see the movie again, and hoping your memories will sustain you until then. 
The elemental unavailability of movies--no attendance allowed on school nights, having to take a bus to get to them, seeing them exclusively in cavernous movie palaces resembling churches--gave them their mystique and made them special. All of this fed into what I call "the cult of longing"—those myriad rituals I engaged in (posters, souvenirs, memorabilia, records, etc.) to best make a lasting memory of a favorite film. 
Over the years, I've found that what this method lacks in instant gratification has been more than made up for in its ability to create a bridge linking the magic of cinema to the durability of dreams.
The Alhambra Theater on Polk Street in San Francisco - The site of my first job
I moved to LA in 1978 but took this photo in 1981 during a visit


BONUS MATERIAL
Moving to Los Angeles allowed me to add autograph collecting to my arsenal of memory-makers. I've still not quite adapted to the celebrity selfie.
Celeste Holm - 1980

Walter Matthau - 1995


Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2017

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE 1969

“I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all of my students are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.”

The malignant propagandizing of fascism—where the authoritarian poses as the individualist, the lockstep conformist masquerades as the iconoclast, and emotionalism and opinion are favored over facts and information—is vividly dramatized in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark’s 1961 novel about the influence an eccentric teacher at a conservative all-girls school has on her impressionable students, was turned into a stage play by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (MarnieCabaretJust Tell Me What You Want) in 1966. Set in EdinburghScotland in the early 1930s, Allen’s straightforward, whittled-down play serves as the source of Ronald Neame’s exceptional 1969 film adaptation starring Maggie Smith in her Oscar-winning role.
Maggie Smith as Miss Jean Brodie
Pamela Franklin as Sandy
Robert Stephens as Teddy Lloyd
Celia Johnson as Miss Mackay
Gordon Jackson as Gordon Lowther

Jean Brodie is a dedicated Junior-sector teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls who, while taking pride in cultivating fervent loyalty and compliance from her pupils (those deemed worthy of being among the elite members of her “Brodie set,” anyway), fancies herself a gifted shaper of minds and liberator of spirits. Refusing to allow herself to be labeled or stigmatized by the provincial mores of the day that would brand her a middle-aged spinster, Jean Brodie asserts that she is in her prime (“The moment one is born for”) and committed to having her students reap the benefits of such timely propinquity. 
Maintaining that the school’s orthodox curriculum promotes stagnation and the upholding of the status quo, the flamboyant Miss Brodie eschews traditional teaching methods, instead choosing to devote class time to waxing poetic on the topics of love, heroism, art, etiquette, and her romanticized fondness for the fascist dictators Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco.

Passionate to a fault, Brodie’s dictatorial side rears its head in her penchant for passing off personal opinions and subjective tastes as unassailable facts; hard and concrete “Brodie Laws” subtly enforced and stringently adhered-to lest one risk falling out of the revered teacher’s much-coveted favor. Dismissive of “team players,” “joiners” and any institution or individual failing to share her world view, Jean Brodie is quick to characterize all who criticize or disagree with her as “the opposition” or “enemy.” This disdain for critique of any sort inspiring Miss Brodie to deputize her pupils and have them act as her protectors and co-conspirators in defying her nemesis, the school’s stern headmistress Miss Mackay.
"Do any of you little girls remember what the followers of Mussolini are called?"
"Fascisti."
"That is correct! F-A-S-C-I-S-T-I."

The narcissistic, leapfrog self-dramatization necessary to lead one to interpret mere professional criticism as personal assault (“I shall remain in this education factory where my duty lies. If they want to get rid of me they will have to assassinate me!”) is precisely the sort grand, larger-than-life attitudinizing that the four girls who make up Miss Brodie’s crème de la crème pupils find so appealing. From her florid gestures and affected speech, to the colorful palette of her wardrobe; Miss Jean Brodie represents romance and daring to the supple young minds of the Brodie girls. The members of the Brodie set: dependable Sandy, beautiful Jenny, histrionic Monica, and hopeless Mary McGregor (every clique needs someone to pick on and and blame).

As is often the case with self-styled iconoclasts, setting oneself apart and drawing attention to oneself eventually become indistinguishable characteristics of the breed, adding perhaps, in the case of Miss Brodie, desirability. Miss Brodie may incur the gossip and resentment of Marcia Blaine’s female staff, but the male staff members are drawn to Miss Brodie like the proverbial moths to flame.
She remains the object of amorous obsession for ex-lover Teddy Lloyd, the school’s very married-with-children art teacherhis being a Catholic the single quality disqualifying him as a suitable lover ("How could a girl with a mind of her own have to do with a man who can't think for himself?" ). Gordon Lowther, the school's vocal coach, is the current lover in her life, but Miss Brodie treats him so much like a work-in-progress sociology assignment, the precocious Brodie girls come to the not-unreasonable conclusion that Miss Brodie (who they know loves artists like Giotto) feels genuine passion for Mr. Lloyd, but because he is married, is merely "working it off" with Mr. Lowther.

The Brodie Set
Pamela Franklin, Diane Grayson, Shirley Steedman, Jane Carr
Even in this shot one can see that Sandy will be the force to reckon with

While keeping her adult relationships at an arms-distance, those most susceptible to the magnetism of Miss Brodie’s bohemian spirit (the most naïve and unquestioning of her charge) are taken into her heart and confidence. So bound are they to her by devotion and admiration, they are blind to her manipulation. Miss Brodie, who looks upon life as a series of heroic experiences, romantic ideals, and lofty principles recklessly applied, is less concerned with the genuine education of the girls (it’s hinted that the Brodie girls, while cultured, come up rather short when it comes to basic academics) than she is committed to teaching them all about life…on her terms.
Setting herself apart and above as the example for the girls to follow, she preaches individualism (if Lewis Carroll’s The Red Queen’s “All ways are my ways” can be thought of as individualism) while stressing that she alone is the source of all truth, honesty, and trust. In the end, as the emergent Spanish Civil War inflames Miss Brodie’s ardency for the fascist Franco (the film takes the girls from 12 to 18-years-old), her impact of her heedless influence takes a dangerous and tragic turn.
In many ways, the charismatic but pernicious Jean Brodie suggests a dark-side variant on that beloved, if overworked, theatrical archetype: the garrulous, irrepressible, meddlesome, manipulative "open a new window" drag queen pied piper exemplified by Mame Dennis, Dolly Levi, and Mama Rose. The latter being plenty dark already.


WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of those remarkable films I fell in love with the first time I saw it. Which was approximately 15 years ago. I had the opportunity to see it during the time of its initial release, but in a year that saw the release of Sweet Charity, Midnight Cowboy, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and The Sterile Cuckoo, my unfamiliarity with Maggie Smith coupled with the starchiness of that title (I can’t even say The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie without my spine spontaneously stiffening) kept me away. Also, being a rather hard sell, marketing wise, the film had a really lousy and misleading ad campaign. As to why I didn't see it in the intervening years, I confess that I assumed it to be one of those remote, inaccessible, British “prestige” pictures that the Academy loves to award with Oscars, so it wasn’t until I was in my 40s and it was broadcast on cable TV that I settled down to watch it. Immediately I knew I would have adored this film had I seen it as a youngster. Not long thereafter, I made a point of reading both the book and the play, I loved it that much.
Miss Brodie's Lovers / Mr. Lloyd
Maggie Smith and Robert Stephen were married at the time. They divorced in 1974

The chief attraction of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is simply the patent magnificence of Maggie Smith, after which comes the film’s sharp and witty screenplay and the top-grade performances delivered by the exceptionally well-cast ensemble. A beguiling balance of character-study, romantic drama, and wistful coming-of-age story, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is also a sobering contemplation on the often disarming face of power.
In profiling an authoritarian figure who presents herself as the instrument of change when in actuality she’s merely a tinpot despot intent on imposing a new dictatorial order (demanding loyalty, repudiating differing points of view, labeling criticism opposition), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is impossible to watch these days without drawing parallels with a certain faux-politician, fame-culture miscreant who-shall-not-be-named. Indeed, the film’s “insidious dangers of fascism” angle has never felt more prescient and relevant.
Miss Brodie's Lovers / Mr. Lowther
Gordon Jackson was married to Rona Anderson, the actress who played Miss Brodie's rival,
Miss Lockhart the chemistry teacher

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I suspect that director Ronald Neame’s early career as a cinematographer accounts for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’s lack of staginess. While interiors dominate, the film feels neither unduly static nor needlessly opened-up, the focus remaining on the relationships, conflicts, and interactions of the characters.
The scenes come in four varieties of cyclical vignettes spanning the girls’ introduction to Miss Brodie during the school’s Junior cycle (age 12 to 15) though to their Senior cycle (15 to 18). The vignettes: 1) Miss Brodie teaching, or, more accurately, inculcating. 2) Scenes depicting the Brodie girls, spurred by their teacher’s romantic fictions and dalliances, evincing an accelerated sexual and intellectual precocity. 3) Miss Brodie’s relationships with Mr. Lloyd (arm’s length) and Mr. Lowther (a project undertaken…like starting a garden). 4) Miss Brodie’s run-ins with the formidable Miss Mackay—intensely hostile, tour de force encounters that make Batman vs. Superman look like a game of jacks.
I personally like how subtly the passage of time is conveyed in the film, but critics have cited (and here they do have a point) that while the young girls make credible inroads to visible maturity over the course of the film’s five to six year time span, Maggie Smith looks exactly the same at the end of the film as she does at the beginning.

The entertaining forcefulness of Maggie Smith’s performance posits the flamboyant teacher—who remains front and center of the narrative even when she’s off-screen—as the preferred alternative to the rigidly dour Miss Mackay. (I’m reminded of The Trouble With Angels when Gypsy Rose Lee pops up as a glamorous dance instructor to the delight of the girls dominated by Rosalind Russell’s stern Mother Superior.)

Smith’s Jean Brodie is so attractive and appealing a personality that we scarcely notice—much less mind—when she exhibits troubling traits like romanticizing a dictator or attempting to orchestrate the seduction of one of her students by a man old enough to be her father. At these moments she seems more naïve and foolish than malicious, and we, like her students, side with her and feel she is an inspiring breath of fresh air.
But as the film progresses and we sense a lack of flexibility in Miss Brodie's point of view; a lack of generosity or kindness in her treatment of Sandy or Mary; when her self-centeredness reveals a disregard for the feelings of the men in her life; when it looks as though the influence she wields over the lives of the girls is really a need to control...there arrives the point of conflict. The film grows darker and we’re no longer quite as certain of whose side we’re on. Suddenly, Miss Brodie doesn't appear quite so harmless.
"She always looks so...extreme!"
Miss Brodie is sized up by members of the Marcia Blaine teaching staff


PERFORMANCES
The risk of portraying an individual who hides behind a façade of studied (and appealing) artifice is risky. If the artifice is more compelling than the individual, caricature can eclipse character. I’m not sure how she does it, but Maggie Smith, while indulging in some of the most humorously florid vocal and physical posturings imaginable, manages to paint a vivid and human portrait of a woman of boundless spirit and reckless bravado who lives her life without a single thing of substance to moor it to beyond the worshipful, too-impressionable girls trusted to her charge.
Depicting a woman channeling her prodigious energies in all directions at once, Smith miraculously conveys both the self-deception and desperation behind the ostentation designed to conceal what may be the truth that Miss Brodie works so hard to evade: that she is not, in fact, in her prime at all, and she knows it.
Mary McGregor (center), devoted to Miss Brodie to a fault, is the film's most poignant character

Miss Brodie's ill-informed, naive proselytizing, encouraging the impressionable to adopt beliefs and pursue risky endeavors which yield no consequences or danger to herself, can't help but remind me of  those selfish, privileged, bubble-protected celebrities who have much to say about political risk-taking and protest (Susan Sarandon comes to mind) while personally having absolutely nothing at stake.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is Maggie Smith’s show, to be sure, but Celia Johnson is extraordinary (both to watch and listen to; her Scottish accent is pure, lilting music). Imagine, if you will, having to find an actress capable of posing a credible threat to the likes of Maggie Smith. On the strength of her facial expressions alone, Celia Johnson’s prim and provincial Miss Mackay is more than up to the job; her scenes with Smith providing the film with some of its most spirited, volcanic moments.
Miss Brodie: "My credo is 'Lift, enliven, stimulate!'"
Miss Mackay: "No doubt...."

But for my money, it is the assured, natural performance of the highly underrated Pamela Franklin (Our Mother's House, The Innocents) that serves to ground the comic/dramatic crescendos of Mmes Smith & Johnson. In portraying the character of Sandy, whose youthful impertinence is the genuine personification of the kind of  intellectual self-determination Miss Brodie professes to encourage in her girls, Pamela Franklin’s unshowy, utterly convincing transformation from inquisitive teen to disillusioned young woman (she was 18-years-old at the time) is one of the unsung miracles of an already outstanding film.


THE STUFF OF FANTASY/REALITY
While satisfying my fondness for Maggie Smith performances and ‘60s movies set in schoolrooms (Up The Down Staircase, To Sir With Love), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is ultimately a subtle and shrewd polemic on the seductive, corrupting nature of power, and the ease with which people can relinquish their freedom when confronted with a forceful personality.
It’s clear to us from the start that Jean Brodie—with her strict guidelines for the proper height to open a window and dismissive attitude towards loyalties shown to anything or anyone but herself—is no champion of independent thought and critical thinking. For all her obvious professional dedication she is more an autocrat than a teacher, her self-serving politics rooted in nothing deeper than a deluded sense of her own importance.
"Benito Mussolini. Il Duce. Italy's leader supreme. A Roman worthy of his heritage.
The greatest Roman of them all."

Touting her own teaching methods as revolutionary while (inaccurately) promoting fascist regimes as drain-the-swamp implementers of a new world utopia; Miss Brodie, like all dictators, merely couches age-old totalitarian philosophies in the rhetoric of liberation.
Back in 1969 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie spoke to the anti-authoritarianism of the youth movement, the sexual revolution, feminism, and the anti-war movement. Today…well, I hardly have to say why a film about a fascist sympathizer being given a broad forum to spread misinformation is as relevant now as George Orwell’s 1984.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a film so good that it warrants a revisit on the strength of its performances and entertainment value alone. But taken as a cautionary tale for our times—a reiteration of the duty and necessity of resistance—I’d say that in this instance, a little time spent in the classroom of one Miss Jean Brodie would be time very well spent, indeed.
"I am the potter and you are my pride.
You are shaping up.
Soon you graduate to the senior school and I will no longer teach you
...but you will always be Brodie Girls."

BONUS MATERIAL

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was nominated for only two Oscars: Best Actress and Best Original Song. "Jean" is sung over the film's closing credits by composer Rod McKuen, but singer Oliver (who had a hit that same year with Hair's "Good Morning Starshine") had a #1 hit on the adult contemporary charts with his single version. Rod McKuen's “Jean” was performed by Lou Rawls on the Academy Awards broadcast, and lost to Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.

AUTOGRAPH FILES
Got Pamela Franklin's autograph in 1981 when she came to Crown Books on Sunset Blvd where I was employed. (she's married to Harvey Jason, hence the last name in parentheses at the end of her signature). In 1998 Franklin and her husband would open up a bookstore of their own on Sunset Blvd - Mystery Pier Books

Al Hirschfeld
Copyright © Ken Anderson