Mr. Topaze

Small-town schoolteacher Albert Topaze is - proverbially - dirt poor. But he is rich in morality and honesty, and this proves to be his downfall.

Mild-mannered and hopelessly in love with his colleague Ernestine, who is also the daughter of his school's stern headmaster, he is a pushover both to the students under his charge and to her, manipulating his affections to ease her own workload.

When he refuses a rich woman's insistence that her grandson's failing school marks must be incorrect, he finds his job hanging by a thread: each school place is charged at a premium, and she has more than one grandchild at the school, boosting the establishment's coffers. However, it is the headmaster's discovery of Albert's feelings for Ernestine that proves to be the tipping point, and he is summarily fired in disgrace.

Meanwhile, another local woman has her sights set on Topaze for a very different reason. Her partner is a crooked businessman and local government official, poised to sign off one of his own companies as supplier - under a lucrative new contract - of refuse services to Paris. For the scheme to pass, however, he needs a middle man to operate the waste company. Topaze could just be intelligent-yet-naive enough to be stooge in the high-yielding venture.