Gradually, Topaze becomes a rapacious financier who sacrifices his honesty for success and, in a final stroke of business bravado, fires Benac and acquires Suzy in the deal.

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Peter Sellers has chosen, in the early scenes, to adopt the diffident, rueful manner and accent of Alec Guinness, while he leaves it to Leo McKern, all snorts and twitches, to present the lively caricature performance.

He leaves Herbert Lom and Nadia Gray amateurishly at sea, he shows no stages of the transformation but simply invites us to accept the fact of Topaze's newly-discovered acumen, and he lets the sympathy seep out of his own characterisation without finding anything to put in its place.

Don Ashton's art direction and some agreeable locations give Mr Topaze an elegant surface; but this is essentially a film of minor pleasures and major inadequacies.

"[8] Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote: "This new version of Pagnol's Topaze has a diluted script by Pierre Rouve that runs about an hour before the plotwheels begin to turn.