Life is an Auction

I Like Money (Dimitri de Grunwald; 20th Century-Fox) is the fourth movie version of Marcel Pagnol's supremely cynical play Topaze. John Barrymore once did the leading role in a Hollywood version, and Fernandel has done it in French.

The story is so amusing that it would be worth seeing even if performed by the Scranton High School Thespian Society.

This new film version has been directed by Peter Sellers. The star is Peter Sellers as well. A little slow, but fey and funny, it has his special touch.

In a small town. French and resoundingly provincial, Sellers (M. Topaze) teaches in a boys' school. His suits need cleaning but his heart is pure. He sits in drafty garrets quoting Pindar and correcting misspelled words like klock and starz. He believes the aphorisms he daily peddles to the young and pimply minds under his charge: There is no profit in ill-gotten gains, and Work tires no one--what tires is laziness, the mother of all vices, and Alcohol kills more surely than a pistol shot. He is a dedicated teacher who loves his work.

He also loves the headmaster's daughter. The headmaster -- a superior comic creation by Leo McKern -- is so cheap that he is not above stealing a pencil from a teacher's desk. A man like that is not about to spin off his daughter to a teacher who earns 1,500 francs a year.

Sellers gets his chance when a rich baroness comes to the school and savagely asks the headmaster why her grandson has received four zeroes on his report card. All Sellers has to do is re-evaluate the child's true intelligence and the world is his. But he is too naive. He says no. he has checked his records, and the kid is really dumb.

Sellers is fired. His naivete proves negotiable, however. A member of the city council of Paris (Herbert Lorn) sets him up as the figurehead of Topaze Ltd.. a vast and rapidly diversifying holding company, mainly holding contracts with the Paris city council. He is approached by blackmailers and surrounded by swindlers.

He hears new aphorisms from his bene factor's mistress ( Nadia Gray). "Life is an auction." she tells him. "Men put up their muscles or their brains, women their bodies. It's all the same." Sellers finally comprehends. Putting up his brains, trimming his beard, he pursues what he can now clearly see is the good life. He overpowers the crook he works for and spirals upward, swiftly becoming an international financier, running stupendous treasuries through his fingers like sand. The camel jumps gracefully through the eye of the needle into the sheer heaven of riches on earth.

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