Topaze (1936)
Directed by Marcel Pagnol

Film Review

It was with his second play, Topaze, that Marcel Pagnol made his name as a playwright.  First performed in Paris in October 1928, the play was an instant success and is among Pagnol's best known works, with no fewer than nine film adaptations having been made to date.  It was Pagnol's dissatisfaction with the first screen version, directed by Louis Gasnier in 1933 and starring Louis Jouvet, that led him to direct his own film adaptation three years later for his recently created film production company.  Fifteen years on, Pagnol would adapt the play for cinema a second time, with the popular comic actor Fernandel roped in to play the lead role.

In Pagnol's famously consistent oeuvre, Topaze stands out on account of its subject matter and surprisingly bleak assessment of human nature.  There are rogues in most of Pagnol's films, but in this early play it is the rogues who predominate - worse, a sympathetic, seemingly incorruptible individual ends up as the worst rogue of all!  An unashamed anti-capitalist satire, Topaze is amusing, even hilarious in places, but it has a very bitter taste to it, and, of all Pagnol's plays, it is the one that has stood the test of time best.  It is as relevant today as it was in the mid-1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, and it is this timeless quality (stemming from the immutability of human nature) that makes it such an enduring success.

When he attempted his first film adaptation of Topaze, Pagnol was still learning his craft as a filmmaker, so the end result can hardly be described as a polished piece of cinema.  The film's imperfections are however made up for by the quality of the script and a superb, totally enthralling central performance from Alexandre Arnaudy, whose portrayal of Topaze is probably the best cinema has given us so far.  Arnaudy's transformation from modest, sweetly naive schoolmaster to rampant capitalist is shocking and we hardly recognise the pig-faced moneygrubber that Topaze becomes in the film's chilling final scenes.  This is Pagnol at his most cynical and unforgiving - quite a revelation for those who know him only through his gentle Provençal dramas.

Film Synopsis

A modest teacher in a boys' school, Topaze does his utmost to instil in his pupils his creed that money can never buy happiness.  His naivety makes him the butt of his boys' jokes and irritates his headmaster, who reprimands him for not giving higher marks to the pupils of the school's more affluent patrons.  When he learns that Topaze has amorous designs on his daughter, the headmaster dismisses him in an instant.  The unfortunate teacher has no choice but to give private lessons to one of his former pupils.  The boy's aunt, Suzy Courtois, introduces him to a town councillor, Régis Castel-Bénac, who offers him a generous income in return for his assistance in certain business activities.  Topaze sees nothing wrong in the arrangement and gladly accepts the offer.  It isn't long before the ex-schoolteacher realises he is being used to front Castel-Bénac's barely legal business deals.  But by this time he has acquired a taste for wealth and seizes the opportunity to make himself a very successful businessman...