Better In Your Head?--THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

Spoiler Alert: six inches is perfectly adequate.

THE BOOK-Written by Muriel Spark, released 1961

THE MOVIE-Directed by Ronald Neame, written by Jay Preston Allen, released 1969

THE STORY-Edinburgh, the 1930s. At the Marcia Blaine School, Jean Brodie is cultivating a small garden of six twelve-year-old girls who, with great care and magnanimous patience, will grow into redoubtable ladies distinguished by exemplary aplomb and towering intellect. (And, ahem, lady boners for fascism.) 

MIND THE GAP-Best known as the woman who put the "pose" in "composure," Maggie Smith won her first Oscar for the role of Jean Brodie, and the Academy's decision is no scalp-scratcher. While not precisely the gray-haired, middle-aged teacher desperate to leave a legacy, she nails every narcissistic beat. The truculent tulip, the reluctant rose, the pouty petunia, the diffident daffodil--she's every plant in the pot. A lesser actress would've not only missed out on a golden trinket, she would've rendered the character (and thus the film) pointless. Dame Maggie's technically stirring, emotionally detached performance impeccably frames the portrait of a drowning woman blowing air into the world's last life raft. I almost believe she cares about these girls.

Besides keeping the narrative entirely linear, the film omits two girls, and plays mix-and-match with some characteristics and ultimate fates. (Sandy "The Snitch" Stranger and Mary "The Marshmallow" MacGregor are standouts in both. Pamela Franklin deserved a better career, probably, and Jane Card is the quintessential stuttering plain-o with pigtails.) 

The "sexy" scenes are as arousing as a trip to the Hormel factory, though.

Monica...Jenny...Douglas...Pamela...my mom mighta read this book.

The behatted Brodie Bunch adore their self-styled captain of culture, a peacock in a yard full of robins. One foot in the grave, the other foot in the gravy, Jean Brodie is the sort of woman fit for fanfic immortality, the type of lady your soul needs to reconcile. Her downfall is her own fault, and if my empathy isn't strong, nor is it weak.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD?-Muriel Sparks wrote as though she'd been trapped in a sandstorm of her own creation. She'd die of thirst before admitting her folly. For every "a six o'clock feeling in the house," there's a useless repetition of a trite descriptor. Often in adaptations, characters rendered in the flesh wind up reduced. Not here. The novel--a pre-war classic, mind--left me feeling displaced. Monotonous, droll to a double-fault. Despite the indelible grossness of the classic Catholic-perv of an art teacher who subsists on the poorly-formed words and deeds of young flesh, and despite so many rolling R's my tongue fell asleep, the film version of The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie is British as fook, and I--American as a missed point--prefer it for that very reason.