Dueling Divas Smackdown: Jean Brodie vs. Sandy: Teacher Gets Schooled!

This is my entry in the Dueling Divas Blogathon, hosted by Lara at Backlots. Click Here for more delicious diva behavior.

And now, let the battle begin. Ladies, try to keep it clean.

In this corner, Jean Brodie

Jean Brodie is a teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburg. Assembling a group of impressionable admirers, the Brodie Set, who she calls the creme de la creme of her students, she proceeds to influence them with her views on learning, life, love and global politics. Miss Brodie dallies with the married music teacher, but allows herself to be courted by the very ordinary, but very eligible music teacher. She encourages her girls to experience the beauties of life in the forms of art, nature and the flesh.

Strengths: Utterly charismatic, stunning in fashionable clothes, enthusiastic and a woman of elevated taste.

Weaknesses: Arrogance, pride, narcissistic and morally dangerous. Worst of all, a phony. She does not have the courage of her convictions.

In this corner, Sandy

Sandy is one of Miss Brodie's inner circle - and her confidant and spy. She is not the prettiest, but Miss Brodie praised her for her insight. She had no idea how right she was. 

Strengths:Clear-eyed, clear-thinking, exceedingly smart, morally straight

Weaknesses: Her youth, her sneakiness, her seeming coldness

The Brodie vs. Sandy duel has 2 outcomes for me, each dependent on my age at the time I viewed their story.

As a young, impressionable girl, I adored Miss Brodie. Her artistic flair, her liberal view of love and bravery seemed brave. I loved that she took on the headmistress, Miss Mackay, tweaking her nose at every turn. I viewed Sandy's "betrayal" as one borne of jealously - a peahen's envy of the peacock's brilliance. A bright and shiny object, Miss Brodie decries the ordinariness of Sandy and her ilk. Her sacking by the headmistress seemed another example of those without imagination crushing the artistic soul.

Now that I am older and wiser, I see the mortal danger of Miss Brodie. She is a fraud. She encourages her protege, Jenny, to have an affair, but she keeps the art instructor at arms length all the while cultivating a respectable relationship with a most ordinary man. She encourages poor Mary McGregor to  follow her brother and fight with Franco. This sends Mary to her death. All the while Miss Brodie stays put in the safety of her tenure.

It is the ordinary, unextraordinary Sandy who sees, step by step, the danger of this teacher. The lives and the futures of the Brodie girls were entrusted to Jean Brodie. Instead, she played out her foolish, selfish fantasies and used her girls as props. She cared not for their future in the real world. Mary's death was the last straw for Sandy. Via the very willing Mrs. Mackay, she put a stop to Jean Brodie's influence. 

Watch the great confrontation between these 2 heavyweights:

Maybe Sandy's motives were not so pure. Maybe she was jealous of the art teacher's unending devotion to Jean Brodie even though he bedded young Sandy (a crime in itself) and maybe she was hurt because Miss Brodie preferred the lovely Jenny. It could never be black and white between those two and Sandy could never forget the great joys of being part of the Brodie Set, but in the end she did the right thing. She was ready to face the world as a responsible, if much less glamorous, adult.* 

Therefore, the winner, ultimately, must be: Sandy

Jean Brodie ignored the cardinal rule of the fight: "Protect yourself at all times." She let the person of her undoing into her inner circle.

Maggie Smith won a well-deserved Oscar for her towering and compelling performance. However, Pamela Franklin as Sandy was her equal every step of the way. When compiling the names of those who were overlooked by Oscar, Pamela Franklin's name belongs on that list.

* in Muriel Spark's novel of the same name, Sandy eventually becomes a nun.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

"The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969) is one of those films that I am never quite done with. No matter how many times I see it, there are things about it that disturb me and make me want to go back for more. I have also changed my view about Jean Brodie over the years, which is probably a good thing (being that she was a proponent of Fascism, Mussolini, Franco and all that).

Charismatic people are always fascinating. And scary. And often dangerous. The hold they have on their subjects can so easily be used for selfish or harmful ends, and I'm afraid Miss Brodie, in all of her fabulous-ness, does just that.

Based on the novel of the same name by Muriel Spark* (and more closely on the later play by Jay Presson Allen), "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" tells the story of the lady of the title, a teacher at the ultra-conventional Marcia Blaine School for Girls in 1930s Edinburgh, Scotland. How Jean got a job teaching there is a bit of a mystery, but, nevertheless, there she is.  Why she would rather teach there than, as arch enemy and headmistress Miss Mackay suggests, a more progressive school is evident. Miss Brodie loves to flaunt convention, to tickle the nose of authority, to push the boundaries and to be a resplendent peacock in a flock of peahens. 

"Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young   shoulders, and all of my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life."

The story centers on Miss Brodie and her chosen girls known as "The Brodie Set." They are: 

Sandy: known for her practicality and chosen as Jean's confidante.

Monica: known for her mathematical brilliance

Jenny: known for her beauty and sexual appeal

Mary McGregor: Jean's most impressionable scapegoat

The film follows these "gels" (as Jean pronounces them with her Scottish burr) from their pre-teen exposure to Miss Brodie to graduation. Long after they have left Miss Brodie's class, she still keeps them close at Marcia Blaine and basks in their adoration of her as she holds forth court on art, love, beauty and politics. She also exposes them to her messy love life. She is passionately in love with married art teacher Mr. Lloyd, and he with her, but his marital status and his religion (Roman Catholicism) makes her keep him at tortuous arms length. Ever the master manipulator, Miss Brodie schemes to have her cake and eat it, too. She dallies with the boring but respectable bachelor Mr. Lowther, and schemes to arrange an eventual affair between Jenny and Mr. Lloyd, thereby conducting a vicarious affair between the man she truly loves and the beautiful girl she can control. Sandy is to be designated as Miss Brodie's spy.

Unfortunately, in addition to her tastes in art and thoughts on love, Miss Brodie also imparts her romantic infatuation with fascism to her gels. Mary McGregor, impressionable and eager to please, leaves for Spain to join her brother (who is fighting in the Spanish Civil War). She goes with Miss Brodie's encouragement and a head filled with a romanticized notion of war and fascism and ends up a casualty in Franco's war when the train she is traveling on is bombed. Most unfortunate for Miss Brodie, she selected the wrong confidante. Not only does Jenny not have the planned affair with Mr. Lloyd (whose various portrait subjects all look like Jean Brodie), it is Sandy who ends up making love to the art teacher. Miss Brodie once declared Sandy to be "insightful, but not instinctive," intimating that she lacked the Brodie flair for life. But clever little Sandy had a few surprises up her sleeve. Jean Brodie could never imagine that any of her chosen set could betray her. How little she really knew them. 


Hurt over Mr. Lloyd's continual fascination with Jean, disgusted by Jean's attempts to get Jenny into a married man's bed and horrified at Mary McGregor's fate, Sandy is the one who finally has enough and confronts her old teacher. She lays Miss Brodie's crimes before her (Brodie did not bother to learn that Mary's brother was fighting against Franco), but Jean is unrepentant. It is Sandy who feels the pain of her adored teacher's influence so thoughtlessly and foolishly wielded over her creme de la creme. Before Sandy leaves to turn her in and get her fired, Jean Brodie yells "Assassin!" Mary McGregor's death, Mr. Lloyd's and Mr. Lowther's and Sandy's great disappointment in the person she admired most mean nothing to her.

The performances, along with the subject matter, raise this film above the ordinary. Maggie Smith won a much-deserved Oscar for her complex and affecting performance. She is stylish, outrageous, refined and utterly spell-binding as Jean Brodie. Never once does this narcissistic creature ever realize the real damage she has done to so many. Smith makes her hard to forget for all of Jean Brodie's failings.

Pamela Franklin, as Sandy, is her equal every step of the way. Her performance goes to the top of my list as one that should have not only received an Academy Award nomination, but one that deserved a win.

In the end, I have to  side with Sandy. When I was younger, I was just as enthralled with Miss Brodie as her students. I overlooked her faults because she was "special." However, Sandy, blindly misjudged and underestimated by Jean, only turns her former teacher in ("betrays" is the word Miss Brodie uses) to the dreaded Miss Mackay after her thoughtless actions lead to the death of poor Mary McGregor and her machinations attempt to start an affair between Jenny and a married man. Maybe Sandy was jealous of Miss Brodie's adoration of Jenny and of Mr. Lloyd's undying passion for her teacher, but Miss Brodie did real harm. Impressionable girls deserve better. The person who influences us the most has the capacity to hurt us the most.

There are some movies that just speak to us and draw us back for repeated viewings. For me, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" is one of those films.


* the film and the book differ in many ways. In the book, there are more girls in the Brodie Set. The emphasis on religion is muted on the screen, as is Sandy's eventual conversion to Catholicism and decision to become a nun.