Rare Sellers pic is out of vault
The actor’s directing debut in 1961 bombed. Its bittersweet air makes it worth seeing.
Is “directorial debut” the right term for an actor stepping behind the camera for the first time if said film is ultimately just a one-off and not the start of a new track of artistic note, à la the careers of Ida Lupino, Clint Eastwood and Jordan Peele? Would “directorial toe dip” be more precise?
In the case of comedy legend Peter Sellers, whose star turns had an authorial tinge even when the director was Stanley Kubrick or Blake Edwards, it’s perhaps surprising he didn’t forge his own auteurist path.
But he gave it a shot once, when his movie career was achieving real lift-off.
The tale of an upstanding provincial French schoolteacher corrupted by money, “Mr. Topaze” was, even in 1961, the umpteenth film version of Marcel Pagnol’s 1928 morality play. Yet it provided a fitting role for someone whose chameleonic character gifts had already proven to be a piquant blend of the eccentric and the engaging.
But when Sellers’ low-key “Mr. Topaze” and its portrait of curdled honesty went nowhere with audiences, it effectively disappeared into the ego-bruised artist’s personal vault, eventually left to languish in the British Film Institute archive.
Now a 2K restoration — spurred by fan support — has given this singular dabble a new, scrubbed-as-much-aspossible light, and while it never achieves the status of hidden laugh riot or ignored gem, it’s far from a failed experiment. Its abiding bittersweetness, in fact — more than its flashes of familiarly dithering humor — has become this “lost” curio’s chief preservative.
The nostalgic air of gentle behavioral comedy captured in long widescreen takes guides us into the bearded, bespectacled Topaze’s world of high-minded integrity regarding the moral education of misbehaving boys and his idealized romantic yearning for flirtatious fellow teacher Ernestine (Billie Whitelaw). She is also, inconveniently, the daughter of the appearance-minded headmaster, Muche (Leo McKern). Topaze augments his income giving private lessons to the nephew of a well-to-do performer, Suzy (Nadia Gray), who sings amusing ditty “I Like Money,” cowritten by George Martin, and the film’s original U.S. release title).
Topaze’s rectitude proves his undoing when he refuses to accommodate his socialclimbing boss in altering the grades of a baroness’ grandson, then is outed for his attraction to Ernestine. Unceremoniously fired, he is the perfect pawn for Suzy’s lover, a rich Parisian councillor (Herbert Lom) who needs a respectable, money-naive frontman for his crooked business dealings.
As a director, Sellers is less confident with the rudiments of pacing and story than he is with letting the talents of his fine cast command the frame. Particularly entertaining are the early signs of how effective Lom would be as a foil for Sellers — namely an already perfected knack for twitchy comic perturbance three years out from unveiling Inspector Dreyfus.
What stands out, unsurprisingly, is Sellers himself — if not his behind-the-scenes navigation, then what obviously mattered most to the ascending star: burnishing his versatility by adding Pagnol’s threadbare, dignified pedant to a growing repertoire of memorably amusing/ hapless characters.