One of the first rules of acting: never work with kids or animals. However helpful (and often unheeded) the warning, it's highly doubtful that any thespian pooch or precocious acting tyke could ever upstage the inveterate scene-stealer Maggie Smith. Whether she's playing the prissy chaperone to Helena Bonham Carter in A Room With a View (1986) or trading drunken quips with Michael Caine in California Suite (1978), the classically trained actress holds the screen with her inimitable delivery and unparalleled comic timing. Although her film career dates back to the late 1950s, Smith only became a star with 1969's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Playing an egocentric schoolteacher in thirties-era Scotland, Smith won the first of her two Academy Awards for this charming and poignant period drama, which 20th Century Fox has just released on DVD under its Studio Classics banner.

Based on the stage version of Muriel Spark's novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie opens in Edinburgh at the very proper Marcia Blaine School for Girls, circa 1932. In this genteel environment, the outspoken schoolteacher Jean Brodie (Smith) is a flamboyant outsider whose credo is "Goodness, truth, and beauty come first." The eccentric bane of the school's stern headmistress Miss Mackay (Celia Johnson), Miss Brodie airily brushes aside criticism to lavish attention on her favorite "Brodie girls." Of the four girls primarily in her sway, only Sandy (Pamela Franklin) questions some of Miss Brodie's more outlandish and ill-informed pronouncements about passion and politics (Miss Brodie worships both Mussolini and Generalissimo Franco). As the years pass, Sandy becomes increasingly disenchanted with her former mentor, whose romanticized view of the Spanish Civil War inspires the most timid of her acolytes (Jane Carr) to make a fateful decision.

At first, Smith's bravura performance comes across as overly theatrical for the screen. She's pricelessly funny and grand, sweeping into the classroom and declaiming about love and art in full-on diva mode, but her performance in these early scenes is almost too big, even for such a self-aggrandizing character. It's when Smith lets us see the fragility and loneliness beneath Miss Brodie's affectations that her performance truly achieves greatness. In one powerful scene, Miss Brodie gradually drops her façade and dissolves into tears before her confused students. Smith pulls off this scene masterfully, fighting to maintain control while overwhelmed by deep sorrow. With this scene, Smith vividly captures the sad essence of Miss Brodie: the reason she's dedicated her "prime" to the "Brodie girls" is because they're all she has in life.

While Smith commands the screen throughout The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she doesn't completely overshadow her excellent co-stars. Johnson (Brief Encounter) makes a fine adversary as the tradition-conscious Miss Mackay, forever locking horns with Miss Brodie. And Robert Stephens, Smith's real-life husband at the time, has a brash energy as the school's womanizing art teacher and former Brodie flame. Aside from Smith, the cast standout is Franklin (The Innocents) as Sandy, the one student who sees through Miss Brodie's grand-dame affectations.

Three years after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie earned Smith the 1969 Academy Award for Best Actress, she would be nominated again for Travels With My Aunt (1972). Playing yet another eccentric role, reportedly once intended for Katharine Hepburn, Smith goes way over the top with mixed results in this uneven comedy from George Cukor. She later won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for California Suite and was nominated for both A Room With A View and Gosford Park (2001). In 1988, she gave what is arguably her greatest performance in the bittersweet character study The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, yet she and this little-seen film were inexplicably ignored by the Motion Picture Academy.

Directed by Ronald Neame, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is an emotionally satisfying and resolutely old-fashioned film that's a wonderful showcase for the marvelous Maggie Smith.

DVD DETAILS
The DVD's only special feature of note is the commentary track featuring Neame and Pamela Franklin (Sadly, Smith is MIA). Now in his nineties, the director speaks warmly of his long friendship with Celia Johnson and his affinity with Robert Stephens, whom he describes as a "calming influence" on the rather "temperamental" Smith. That's about as close as the scrupulously polite Neame gets to sharing any dirt about the film's leading lady. Otherwise, Neame talks about striving for realism in the film's look, and casting the Brodie girls, most of who were novice actresses, except for Franklin. Nineteen years old during the film's production in Edinburgh, Franklin shares some funny stories about meeting Princess Margaret on the set and how the producers deleted any off-color scenes that might offend the Queen Mother before the film's premiere in London.