This is the second part of a three-part column. Read part 1.
None of the other works on my list can boast The Admirable Crichton’s range of genres, but Pagnol’s Topaze might take the prize for the varied casting of its title role.
Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) wrote a good many plays in his heyday, virtually none of which is ever revived—as a play. In fact, it’s likely that English-speaking theatergoers wouldn’t know his name at all if not for two facts: First, when sound film came in, Pagnol shifted his focus from the stage to the screen. The plays that had made him a notable figure in the 1920s Paris theater became, after 1930, a lucrative source of material for French cinema, and Pagnol himself swiftly became one of its major practitioners. Secondly, his plays-turned-films became, on at least two occasions, sources for Broadway musicals: Harold Rome’s Fanny (1954) and Stephen Schwartz’s almost-but-not-quite-Broadway attempt, The Baker’s Wife (1976).
But before he created these bittersweet mixtures of romance and comedy, drawn from recollections of his Provençal boyhood, Pagnol had made his mark in 1920s Paris chiefly as a social satirist. In this category, by far his biggest hit was his 1928 comedy, Topaze, the tale of a stodgy, naively idealistic, provincial schoolmaster who gets fired because he refuses to give a spoiled-brat student with upper-echelon connections a passing grade. At almost the same time, through a series of ironic coincidences, he gets hooked into serving as a frontman for a big industrial firm that wants to carry on its shady business under cover of the virtuous platitudes he spouts. When, inevitably, he realizes he’s being had, the worm unexpectedly turns, and drippy Professor Topaze become the biggest shark in this ocean full of profit-hungry piranhas.
The lead role of Topaze—with its many transitions from lowly, bumbling pedant to cunning wheeler-dealer—has tempted a long and improbably varied string of great actors. Louis Jouvet, who was among the first to be offered the role in the play’s world premiere, wasn’t available at the time; but he jumped at the chance to play it on film in Louis Gasnier’s basically straight-on version, which, rather flatly filmed, proved to be only a prelude to a parade of cinema renderings. In the interim, the play’s Paris success was followed by enthusiastic receptions in London and New York, in a translation by British playwright Benn W. Levy; on Broadway, its hero’s meek-to-monster transition was charted by Frank Morgan, later a beloved film icon as the man to whom you were supposed to pay no attention behind the curtain.
We have no film record of Morgan’s Topaze because the role was snagged, in the 1933 Hollywood version that came out almost simultaneously with Jouvet’s, by a far bigger matinee idol: John Barrymore. Barrymore, who loved displaying his versatility, seized on the chance to suppress his handsome features and thunderous Shakespearean voice behind the naive schoolmaster’s scruffy beard and primly pompous diction. Scripted from Levy’s adaptation by the team of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the film streamlines and somewhat oversimplifies Pagnol’s point, but a surprising amount of it strikes home sharply, and the director—an Argentine-born Frenchman of aristocratic descent, with the double-barreled name of Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, who had been Chaplin’s assistant director on The Gold Rush—maintains a sardonic and convincingly French atmosphere surprisingly close to Pagnol in spirit. Being pre-Code, it also followed the French original in terms of its moral laxity: When RKO tried to rerelease it a few years later, the cuts and rewrites the Production Code office demanded would have required such a costly amount of reshooting that the studio simply dropped the idea.
The main reason for RKO’s urge to reissue Topaze may have been the sudden climb to superstardom of Barrymore’s costar, Myrna Loy, who played the shady industrialist’s sympathetic mistress. In the year following Topaze’s release, she played William Powell’s spouse and sleuthing partner in The Thin Man, and had overnight become America’s role model of the smart, sophisticated modern woman, a far cry from her early-talkie years in “exotic” roles such as the vindictively jealous gypsy girl in The Desert Song and the title character’s slinky, sadistic daughter in The Mask of Fu Manchu. But beyond Loy’s newfound esteem lay another reason RKO wanted to rerelease Topaze: a new French version (1936), this one directed by Pagnol himself. Not much seems to be known about this version, which isn’t widely available. Its cast contains no particularly recognizable names, and, apart from the author wishing to put his own directorial stamp on the work, it’s puzzling that the French would want another rendition, with the Jouvet version still fresh in the memory.
World War II interrupted Topaze’s cinematic career, but the stuffy professor, like capitalism itself, bounced back quickly enough, though in a far more clownish way. Pagnol himself brought the work to the screen again in 1951—only this time the central figure was neither the dryly sardonic Louis Jouvet nor the more sprightly Alexandre Arnaudy, who had played it for Pagnol in the 1936 film version. Instead, the Topaze of the 1951 film was Fernandel, the horse-jawed comedy star whose broad style had made him king of the French box office for decades, in films with titles like What a Day for a Wedding! and The Concierge’s Darling. A music-hall veteran born in Marseilles, he had appeared in several of Pagnol’s rural comedies, including The Well-Digger’s Daughter. Fernandel had the skill and tact to avoid overplaying—he could create a serious psychological portrait, as he did with his small role in Julien Duvivier’s Un Carnet de Bal (1937)—but there’s no denying that next to the crispness of a Jouvet or a Barrymore, his work seems heavy-handed. As if to underscore the disparity, Pagnol cast, in the key role of the school’s hypocritical headmaster, Marcel Vallée, who had played the same role opposite Jouvet 17 years earlier, and who sometimes seems to be waiting for Fernandel to stop grandstanding and get back into the scene.
This time around, it took 10 years for English-speaking film to catch up with the French in adapting Topaze to the new clownish spirit. In 1961, Peter Sellers, already established as Britain’s top comedy star, and only a few years away from his elevation to cinematic immortality through the roles of Dr. Strangelove and Inspector Clouseau, made his directorial debut with Mr. Topaze, naturally casting himself in the lead. This time around, the industrialist’s goodhearted mistress, played by Nadia Grey, was a musical-comedy star, whose hit song became the title for the film’s U.S. release: I Like Money. The egomania and anxiety that made Sellers so notoriously “difficult” for his colleagues in later years seem to have been relatively quiescent here. At any rate, he surrounded himself with a dressy, top-drawer cast: Leo McKern as the headmaster, Billie Whitelaw as his conniving daughter (a character omitted from the Barrymore version), Martita Hunt as the baroness whose bratty grandson is the source of Topaze’s troubles, and, as the shady industrialist who recruits him, Herbert Lom, who would shortly carve his own small niche in cinema immortality as Chief Inspector Dreyfus, Inspector Clouseau’s long-suffering boss, in the Pink Panther films. And while Sellers’ version dips into slapstick, and his Topaze engages in more double takes than a Jouvet or Barrymore would stoop to, the film hews closer to Pagnol’s original than one might expect. Some reviewers, in fact, complained when it was first released that it was too restrained, lacking the free-form comedy they associated with Peter Sellers films.
Stay tuned for part 3, the conclusion of this “Recycled Repertoire” series, coming soon.
