The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a 1969 British drama film directed by Ronald Neame from a screenplay written by Jay Presson Allen, adapted from her own stage play, which was in turn based on the 1961 novel of the same name by Muriel Spark.

[3] The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie premiered at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and was released in UK cinemas on 24 February 1969 and in the US on 2 March 1969.

Brodie catches the eye of Gordon Lowther, the school's music teacher and choirmaster, with whom she and the girls spend weekends at his luxurious estate in Cramond.

As the Brodie Set grow older and progress closer to the senior school, they frequent Teddy Lloyd's studio, where he paints Jenny's portrait.

The cast included two pairs of married actors: Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, and Gordon Jackson and Rona Anderson.

We finish in the present tense of Sister Helen's interview, as she identifies the key influence of her life by saying, "There was a Miss Jean Brodie – in her prime."

Allen created a successful play out of a novel that was challenging to adapt, first, because it is very short, but mainly because the novel is very introspective and internally-focused - making it excellent for the silent reader but difficult to externalise in production media like theatre, film and television.

Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in the New York Times, wrote "Jay Presson Allen...created a much better play than is generally recognized.

[7] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Somewhat sadly, in bringing Miss Brodie's prime to the screen, Jay Presson Allen has turned not to Muriel Spark's novella but to her own stage version of it; and the result, predictably, is a dramatisation of a dramatisation, a succession of scénes-a-faire and telling monologues which provide a field day for the principal performers at the expense of that elusive irony that gave the original story most of its distinction. ...

Maggie Smith brings the heroine with her consciously theatrical gestures and trite romantic fantasies vividly to life, and both Celia Johnson, registering tight-lipped disapproval as the sensible headmistress, and Pamela Franklin, as the girl who betrays her, more than hold their own.

But verbal onslaught and endless exchanges of significant observations prove a poor substitute for the understated and half-understood interactions of a tightly knit group of characters.

Though the mixture of good and harm that the eccentric teacher provokes does emerge from all the hyperbole, one is left with the impression of having glimpsed not the prime but the trial of Miss Jean Brodie.

And this impression of a series of verbal battles between an articulate defendant and a wily prosecuting counsel is only heightened by Neame's imperceptible direction.

Robert Stephens and Gordon Jackson are also on form as the men in Smith's life, and Pamela Franklin impresses as the pupil who turns Judas.

Dave Kehr of Chicago Reader wrote that Smith gives "one of those technically stunning, emotionally distant performances that the British are so damn good at.