La donna di Parigi

A Woman Of Paris was an acclaimed success with the critics when it was Originally released on 1st October 1923. However, the audience despised it as they wanted to see Charlie Chaplin the tramp starring in a film not a film directed by Chaplin in which he does not appear (albeit in a small cameo role). When i first saw the film on BBC2 around Christmas 1998 i thought Chaplin had a starring role so was naturally disappointed when i found out this wasn't the case. However, since then i have become a huge fan of Chaplin and all his work so now I think this film is rated among Chaplin's best features. His musical score composed in 1976 with Eric Rogers was Chaplin's last ever work in his film career which spanned 62 years. By 1976 Chaplin was very frail and struggled to communicate so the fact that he could compose the music for a near 80 minute film is amazing and the fact that the music score is as good as any of his other films is also astonishing. Charles Chaplin was a true genius of Cinema and A Woman Of Paris is an excellent example of Chaplin as director, writer and composer.

1923's "A Woman of Paris is probably not what you'd expect in a Chaplin film based on the totality of his body of work, both in features and in shorts. However, that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile viewing. It just means if you are new to Chaplin, you might not want to start here.

"A Woman of Paris" showed Chaplin's talent behind the camera without him appearing in front of it, except for a lone cameo in which he quickly appears and then disappears acting as a luggage boy. He made it for two reasons, to do some pioneering in cinematic technique and to help give his long time costar and companion Edna Purviance a career boost. The film is actually quite good with great performances by Purviance and by Adolphe Menjou as a carefree playboy. The film did make a star out of Menjou. It didn't really help Purviance that much. The film is about a pair of star-crossed lovers that circumstance drives apart and then brings back together and the eventual tragedy that occurs due to the weakness of will of Purviance's character's one time fiancé, played by Carl Miller.

The film was a failure at the box office, not because it was bad, but because audiences expected to see Chaplin when they went to a Chaplin film. After the failure of this film, Chaplin went back to formulas that were tried and true for him and never really went out on a limb experimenting again, which is too bad for all of us.

This is an exquisite film that needs to be seen with some understanding of the era in which it was made. It was a critical success for good reason, and it's ironic style and subtle acting was a great influence on directors such as Lubitsch. It was not a popular success in the US but was well understood and acclaimed as such in Europe. I notice that some reviewers decry it as melodrama, but there is no reason why melodrama should not be an acceptable form of art. I would urge viewers to immerse themselves more in the treasures of the silent cinematic era, as there are many lessons to be learned therefrom for today's aspiring artists in any medium.

Finally saw Woman of Paris: this was a legendary film in its day, but mostly because it was virtually never re-released for sixty years after it premiered in 1923, so the legend grew in its absence. The parts of the story that were not told would have made a better movie than the movie, for example why the lovers' fathers at the beginning of the film are against the marriage, and how Marie (Edna Purviance) became a (shudder) "Woman of Paris" during the year following her departure from her fiance. So I didn't buy the story but the camera work and editing do marvelous things with the story that is there. The melodramatic climax is a bit much to be believed, but not comical as a lot of silent mellers appear today. A little D.W. Griffith (sophisticated early use of photography to tell story and set mood), a little Tolstoy ("bad woman" story contrasted with storyteller's emphasis on happy marriages and wholesome family life), a touch of Dreiser ("sinful" characters shown with realistic insight) and I'd guess a soupcon of Terrence Ratigan (sophisticated attitudes) but I doubt he was around then. The ad copy for this film says Chaplin has a cameo as a railway porter but I didn't notice one in the train scene: I suspect instead he was the ticket agent whose hand appears pointing out the ticket window toward the train. Altogether a satisfying and entertaining film, but the story would have been better if Chaplin had worked on it a little longer.

Fans of Charlie Chaplin flocked to the theaters anticipating a good laugh in his next film, September 1923's "A Woman In Paris." Despite a disclaimer in the beginning of the movie that this was a serious drama, viewers paying to see a comedy were dismayed and disappointed by it. But movie critics loved it, praising its subtleties and emotional depth. As writer David Robinson stated, "Chaplin inaugurated a whole new style of comedy of manners, and new styles of acting to suit it...by revealing the inner workings of his characters' hearts and minds through their external actions and expressions."

Chaplin felt that his regular comedic sidekick, Edna Purviance, who appeared in over 30 of his films since 1915, was becoming too mature of an actress to continue doing slapstick. He wanted to feature her in a serious, dramatic role to illustrate her expressive and sincere yet sober acting abilities. Gleaming a story idea from one of the country's most gold-digging of multi-millionaire wives, Peggy Hopkins Joyce, Chaplin formulated a story on a woman who leaves for Paris on a train after her supposed fiancee doesn't show up at the platform. Marie (Purviance) hooks up with a rich businessman, Pierre (Adolphe Menjou), and lives the life of luxury, until she meets up with her former fiancee. A suicide spices up Chaplin's plot, all derived from Joyce's own personal experiences. The comedian at the time was having a fling with this most interesting Virginian-born woman, Peggy Joyce, whose fangs dug into six very lucrative marriages. She was famous for quotes such as "True love was a heavy diamond bracelet, preferably one that arrived with its price tag intact."

Once the public realized the movie was all serious and lacked a Chaplin presence (he did have a short cameo as a train porter), the chairs in the theaters playing it became empty. Chaplin was forced to pull "A Woman In Paris" prematurely, which, being his first film for his co-ownershipped United Artists, hit the company's bottom line.

Chaplin's original desire to launch a new direction for Purviance fell flat. Not only was the film a failure at the box office, but a New Year's Day incident of 1924 involving a male friend put a crimp on her future acting ambitions. Attending an intimate gathering of three at oil magnate Courtland Dines' apartment with actress Mabel Normand, Purviance witnessed chauffeur Horace Greer (alias Joe Kelley) arrival to pick up Mabel. Conflicting accounts were given as to what happened next: either Greer saw something that hinted Dines being caught in the act with Mabel, or the host unexplicably approaching him angerly waving a wine bottle. Whatever happened, the chauffeur shot Dines three times. Purviance went to the wounded Dines assistance, and for the next 90 minutes tried to staunch the wounds in his bed. Greer drove to the police station to give himself up while the two actresses finally called an ambulance. With Dines refusing to testify during the trial, the jury came back with a not guilty verdict.

The scandal, with all the rumors filling in the blanks, basically slowed Purviance's career to a crawl. She was in one other Chaplin film, 'A Woman of the Sea,' which the unhappy director destroyed, and a 1927 French film. Her two uncredited parts in Chaplin's later movies were her swan songs of the secretary who turned into a movie actress. She received a small monthly salary from Chaplin for the remainder of her life. When she passed away in 1958 at 62, Chaplin, who appeared in over 30 movies with the actress, said "How could I forget Edna? She was with me when it all began."