A Woman of Paris (1923)

d. Charles Chaplin / USA / 78 mins.


TO THE PUBLIC:
In order to avoid any misunderstanding, I wish to announce that I do not appear in this picture. It is the first serious drama written and directed by myself.
- CHARLES CHAPLIN

So says the first title card of Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, for better or for worse. Conceived as a film to showcase the talents and appeal of his frequent leading lady Edna Purviance, A Woman of Paris is a unique entry in Chaplin's catalogue of films. By 1923 he had made many wonderful comedies (with his best still to come) and even films that dabbled in the dramatic and sentimental, but nothing fully realized as a drama. The result is a film without much resounding emotion and one of Chaplin's weaker productions.

Purviance's relationship with Chaplin began in 1915, and the two appeared on-screen together in thirty-three of his productions, including all but one of his films with Essanay Studios and all of his films with Mutual Studios and First National. Chaplin undeniably saw something in her (the two were romantically linked for a couple of years), but as an actress I've always found her performances relatively flat. Perhaps it's because she's continually cast as the straight-woman against his slapstick shenanigans and she never had much of an opportunity to stand out. Her best role was in Chaplin's The Kid (1921), but even then she doesn't steal anything away from Chaplin (arguably Jackie Coogan was the one who did that). In A Woman of Paris she plays Marie, a girl from a small French town who loves an artist named Jean (Carl Miller). Their engagement is ill-fated (he has an unhealthy attachment to his parents) and she ends up as a mistress to a wealthy man in Paris. When Marie and Jean cross paths again, their romance is rekindled but obstacles still stand in their way.

A Woman of Paris was Chaplin's first film for United Artists, which Mary Pickford, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and he founded together. He was a true renaissance man, and as with all of his films, he directed it, wrote it, produced it, and composed its score. (And contrary to the title card, although he does not star, he does appear on-screen in a cameo at a train station.)

It's said audiences expected a traditional Chaplin comedy and their poor reaction to this drama disappointed him. I sympathize, yet must admit the film is a disappointment not for its lack of comedy (Chaplin was capable of great drama; for example: Limelight) but for its lack of core emotion. There are touches of Chaplin's regular satire on the bourgeois class, but none of the emotions or sentiments go very far – most problematically, you never really believe Marie and Jean love each other as much as the film would like you to believe they do.

Although the idea behind the film was to launch a career for Purviance independent of Chaplin's, she starred in only two more films after A Woman of Paris – A Woman of the Sea, an unreleased and now-considered-lost film directed by Josef von Sternberg and produced by Chaplin; and Education de Prince, a French film totally unaffiliated with Chaplin. She retired from acting in 1928 but remained on Chaplin's payroll until her death in 1958, and Chaplin would not venture into straight drama again for decades.