A Woman of Paris (1923)

A Woman of Paris is an American romantic film drama first released in 1923, directed by Charles Chaplin.  The film stars Edna Purviance, Clarence Geldart, Carl Miller, Lydia Knott and Charles K. French.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Marie St Clair and her lover Jean Millet plan to leave their French village and start a new life in Paris as man and wife.  On the eve of their departure, Marie is locked out of her house by her cruel stepfather and Jean tries to persuade his parents to let her spend the night in their house.  Knowing that Marie is a woman of ill repute, Jean’s father refuses and so Jean and Marie decide to elope to Paris that night.  When Jean is prevented from leaving by the sudden collapse of his father, Marie makes the journey alone.  A year later, Marie lives a life of unbridled luxury as the mistress to successful businessman Pierre Revel.  She is upset when she learns that her sugar daddy intends to marry a wealthy heiress, and is not cheered when he says he still intends to keep her as his mistress.  One evening, Marie is invited to a party in the Latin Quarter but, having mistaken the address, she finds herself in the apartment belonging to her former lover Jean.  Seeing that Jean is now a successful painter, Marie asks him to paint her portrait.  Jean is still deeply in love with Marie and cannot give her up, even though he is appalled when he learns that she is a kept woman...

Charles Chaplin’s first serious drama was not only a watershed in the career of Chaplin, but also a significant milestone in the development of cinema.   A Woman of Paris is arguably the first realist drama, where all of the main characters are played in a naturalistic way, rather than in the stylised expressionistic manner which characterised virtually all earlier films.  Significantly, this was the first film which Chaplin directed in which he himself did not have a credited role, although he makes a brief cameo appearance as a station porter.

Chaplin’s inspiration for the film was Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a well-known adventurer who made a career of marrying millionaires for their money and divorcing them soon afterwards.  Chaplin was to have been Joyce’s sixth victim, but the actor-director failed to succumb and instead he made Joyce the central character in A Woman of Paris.  That character was played by Chaplin’s leading lady and onetime lover Edna Purviance, the star of many of his previous films.  At the time of making this film, Chaplin was pursuing a very public love affair with the actress Pola Negri, and the highs and lows of this relationship are believed to have greatly influenced this film.  Typically for Chaplin at this time, there was no script for this film and scenes were shot in the order in which they occur in the final film, an approach that would be unthinkable today, for cost reasons.

A Woman of Paris is a considerably more sophisticated film than was commonplace at the time.  The characters are far from being the stock stereotypes, but complex, well-rounded individuals that constantly challenged audience expectations.  There are no obvious heroes or villains in this film.  The three main characters are a prostitute who is flawed but not unsympathetic, an artist who is passionate but weak-willed and a Lothario who is both cynical and charming.  Each character shows his or her emotions and motivations in a subtle manner and frequently takes us by surprise, as they might do in real life.  With this film, Chaplin effectively invented the modern film drama, imitating life as closely as possible rather than merely providing a crude stylised representation of it.

Although critical reaction to the film was generally very positive, it was not appreciated by the cinema-going public and proved to be a major financial disaster.  Audiences were clearly not motivated to watch a Chaplin film without Chaplin in it and it did not help that several states in the US banned the film for its perceived immorality.   This outcome was not what Chaplin had expected and it would prevent him from taking similar risks in future.  Although Chaplin was himself personally very fond of the film, it was not shown again until fifty years after its first release.  In 1976, it was re-released with a new score which Chaplin himself composed, the last piece of work he completed before his death.  Today, A Woman of Paris is widely regarded as one of the director’s great achievements and ranks alongside some of his subsequent, more popular masterpieces as an essential piece of film history.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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