The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Muriel Spark's wonderful slip-sliding novella is narrowed down and heightened in Jay Presson Allen's adaptation for Fox of her own stage play (drawn from Spark's book), which omits much sense of the wider, crueller world of the '30s outside the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, where Miss Brodie imparts her own rarefied, romantic view of life to her chosen 'set'. Nevertheless, Maggie Smith is handed a part in the eccentric, trite, purposeful and finally pathetic Jean Brodie which allows her to play to all her considerable strengths. Her performance is ably counterpointed by Stephens as the knowing, married art teacher Teddy Lloyd (to whose bed she attempts to send one of her girls, in her own place), and Celia Johnson as the pursed headmistress determined to sack her. Good support, too, from the girls, notably Jane Carr, as Mary McGregor, the new girl who dies on her way to fight against Miss Brodie's hero Franco, and Pamela Franklin, as Sandy, who finally puts paid to her teacher by denouncing her fascism.