Review: â€˜Mr. Topaze,’ Peter Sellers’ directing debut, emerges from the star’s vault

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 British comedy legend Peter Sellers, whose versatile performance mastery gave his star turns an authorial tinge even when the director was a Stanley Kubrick or Blake Edwards, it’s perhaps surprising he didn’t go the way of Chaplin, Keaton, Tati and Lewis and forge his own auteurist path.

But he gave it a shot once, when his movie career was achieving real lift-off — after U.K. hits “I’m Alright Jack� and “The Mouse That Roared� but before the iconic twofer of Clouseau and Strangelove. 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 also provided a fitting seriocomic 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 — physically and figuratively — into the ego-bruised artist’s personal vault, eventually left to languish in the British Film Institute archive after his death. Now a 2K restoration — spurred by fan support — has given this singular dabble from a troubled craftsman’s oeuvre a new, scrubbed-as-much-as-possible 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 — is what has become this “lost� curio’s chief preservative.

The nostalgic air of gentle behavioral comedy captured in long widescreen takes is what guides us into the bearded, bespectacled title character’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 meager income giving private lessons to the nephew of a well-to-do performer named Suzy (Nadia Gray, who at one point sings the amusing ditty “I Like Money,� cowritten by George Martin, and also the film’s original U.S. release title).

Topaze’s rectitude proves his undoing, however, when he refuses to accommodate his social-climbing boss in altering the poor marks of a haughty baroness’ grandson, then gets outed for his attraction to Ernestine. Unceremoniously fired, the vulnerable Topaze becomes the perfect pawn for Suzy’s lover, a rich Parisian councillor (Herbert Lom) who needs a respectable and money-naive frontman for his crooked business dealings.

As the movie wends its way from a happy stickler’s classroom purity to big bad world lessons learned the hard way, “Mr. Topaze� seems to parallel what Sellers himself surely wrestled with as he steered the leap from free-spirited goofball to sophisticated leading man. That personal connection is ever-present in Sellers’ sturdy, unsentimental portrayal of a country mouse forced to transform, fully aware of what he’s losing and gaining in the process.

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 — from Whitelaw’s wily effervescence to McKern’s toadying bluster — command the frame (a generosity he didn’t always show costars later as a power-wielding marquee name). Particularly entertaining are the early signs of how effective Czech-born stalwart Lom would be as a foil for Sellers — namely an already perfected knack for twitchy comic perturbance three years out from unveiling Inspector Dreyfus in “A Shot in the Dark.�

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 with a blind spot to a growing repertoire of memorably amusing/hapless characters.