The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) is a British drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Ronald Neame and starring Maggie Smith in the role that won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Based on Muriel Spark's novel, it is set in an elite Edinburgh girls' school during the 1930s.

Miss Jean Brodie teaches literature but delivers something else entirely — her own gospel of love, beauty, and fascist aesthetics. She picks a circle of favorites, shapes them in her image, conducts affairs with two male colleagues simultaneously, and openly admires the order of Mussolini's Italy. Her girls adore her. But one of them, Sandy, is watching more carefully than the rest.

Smith plays Brodie not as a villain but as a woman of absolute conviction who cannot see what her conviction costs other people — and that is what makes the performance remarkable forty-plus years on. Director Neame and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen sharpened Spark's irony without softening the portrait. Watch The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) online on iFILM.