Period pieces

A tale of two Topazes

by Steve Vineberg

TOPAZE, Directed by Harry D'Abbadie D'Arrast. Screenplay by Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, and Benn W. Levy, based on the play by Marcel Pagnol. With John Barrymore, Myrna Loy, Reginald Mason, and Luis Alberni. At the Harvard Film Archive, February 9.

TOPAZE, Written and directed by Marcel Pagnol, based on his play. With Fernandel, Hélène Predrière, Jacqueline Pagnol, Marcel Vallée, and Jacques Castelot. At the Harvard Film Archive, February 16.

No one today registers the name of Marcel Pagnol's 1928 comedy Topaze, but it was a hit in its time, and it furnished the source material for no fewer than five movies. The Harvard Film Archive has elected to screen two of them -- the 1933 Hollywood adaptation, directed by Harry D'Abbadie D'Arrast and starring John Barrymore as the unworldly schoolmaster who falls from innocence, and the 1951 French version, which Pagnol directed himself (the closest to the original), featuring the peerless clown Fernandel. The play is a sturdy vehicle for a distinctive comic personality -- it's easy to imagine Eddie Bracken in it, or Danny Kaye. The same year as the Barrymore film, Louis Jouvet attempted it in an early French talkie -- he gave a lovely performance, playing Topaze as a moony beanpole. And Peter Sellers starred in an English remake in the early '60s.

Pagnol's play is midway between a boulevard comedy and a satirical farce with Shavian overtones. Topaze loses his job at a skimpily run private boys' school when the wealthy mother of one of his pupils complains about her son's low grades and Topaze refuses to compromise his standards to give the woman satisfaction. He has a child's faith in the triumph of industry over dishonesty and in the essential goodness of the world, so when the aunt of a boy he tutors, an elegant Parisienne, and her corrupt councilman lover hire him to serve as a middleman -- the phony director of a company under the councilman's control -- it never occurs to him that he's being asked to break the law. Learning the truth, he moves from shock and shame to a recognition that money is the power that governs the world. The discovery doesn't embitter him, however: he puts his brain to work to outsmart his boss. He figures out how to build a better -- illicit -- mousetrap.

The play reads badly, but when you see how Pagnol directs it, in what must be the definitive version, you begin to understand why it's fared so well. It's somehow both naturalistic and stylized at the same time. The actors perform in a more muted variation on the highly technical (but sometimes magical) Comédie-Française style that earlier French stars like Jouvet embodied while at the center of the action Fernandel does take after take, his outsize features -- rectangular face, huge dark-moon eyes, ears pressed to the sides of his head like impaled butterflies -- shaping comic metaphors for embarrassment, outrage, shy amorousness. But the minimalist staging, in what feel like deliberately banal realist settings, grounds the archetypal story. The movie doesn't have much visual distinction, except perhaps in the dresses Schiaparelli designed for Fernandel's leading lady, Hélène Predrière, but its civilized approach provides its own set of pleasures; I couldn't help thinking that this would be a far more successful way to mount Molière than the usual bumptious overstylization we see in this country. (And Jacqueline Pagnol, who plays the headmaster's daughter Ernestine, a canny go-getter, would be right in her element as one of Molière's wisecracking maids.) This is cinéma de papa, French studio filmmaking of the post-war period, for better and for worse: it's completely entertaining, but in such a bourgeois, unadventurous way that you can see why the New Wave directors needed to rebel against it.

You wouldn't turn to the American movie of Topaze, with its script (mostly) by Ben Hecht, for a sense of Pagnol's play. D'Abbadie D'Arrast went in for a sort of fluffy lyricism: the rhythms are artificially slowed down, with retards built into them, sometimes for visuals he clearly enjoyed for their own sake -- a long shot of a stunning art deco anteroom (Van Nest Polglase designed the interiors), a rear-projection shot of a street framed by a rain-soaked cab window, a montage, inspired by Murnau's The Last Laugh, depicting Topaze's horror when he learns the truth about his new job. It's an odd little picture, with Myrna Loy -- in her unformed, clotheshorse period -- as the femme fatale, and Luis Alberni wearing a mole on his right cheek that looks like a blob of ink.

But it has John Barrymore in almost every scene, and nothing else matters. There's a slightly removed quality about his Topaze: his voice has a strange, faraway timbre, as if it were ringing in a sphere of its own, and he seems to float through the movie in a bubble of calm. It's acting of a decided high style, but you'll recognize this man -- he's every eccentric, out-of-his-time teacher you ever encountered, absurd and touching, generating a fondness in you that perhaps you can't entirely explain. Fired from his job, he returns to his classroom to hand out a final assignment to his charges, as if he had no idea what else to do. Barrymore was past his peak by the time he made it into the movies, but a handful of his screen performances -- in Svengali, Dinner at Eight, Twentieth Century -- are indispensable. Topaze offers another such performance, and the movie is so rarely shown that you can't afford to miss this chance to see it.