The year was 1919, and Charles Chaplin, along with Douglas Fairbanks, D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford, formed the distribution company United Artists. Four years later, made with his own money and on his own schedule, Chaplin released his first film for UA, A Woman of Paris — which was neither a comedy nor starred the world-famous actor. A move so unusual, Chaplin included a title card letting the audience know the movie they were about to see was his first “serious drama.”
Watching A Woman of Paris today — beautifully restored and available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection — it’s obvious Chaplin was out to prove something. Prove he was more than his Tramp character, and prove cinema was more than mere entertainment.
The prevalent thinking of the time was that the camera could only photograph surfaces, not interiors. Chaplin knew better and set out to do with cinema what Ernest Hemingway would do with prose and capture the whole iceberg. Chaplin wasn’t the only filmmaker who understood this, and there’s little about Woman of Paris that’s revolutionary. Still, Chaplin’s skill of communicating significant information with small touches — particularly when it comes to sexual relations at a time when even a hint was taboo — carries the kind of cleverness that’s timeless.
Marie St. Clair is the Woman of Paris, a penniless gal who’s in love with an artist but ends up in the hands of a wealthy tycoon. Marie’s story was inspired by Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a Jazz Age dancer for whom the term “gold digger” was invented. Joyce married three millionaires by the time she was 27. Chaplin would have been her fourth had he not broken off the engagement.
To play Marie, Chaplin turned to his longtime screen and one-time romantic partner, Edna Purviance. The two had worked together since 1915, but Woman would be her high-water mark. From today’s vantage, Purviance’s performance might come across as stiff, but she’s quite good alongside the dashing and easygoing businessman Pierre (Adolphe Menjou) and the tortured artist, Jean (Carl Miller).
A Woman of Paris was a success when it was released, but nothing like Chaplin’s comedies, which he returned to in 1925’s The Gold Rush. But Woman is more than a curio in Chaplin’s career. It’s a master filmmaker exploring what cinematic language can convey, from using 175 intertitles to giving the actors dialogue to speak — an uncommon practice at the time. Chaplin believed the face registered a recognizable emotion when it said a specific line. An assumption that would prove correct when synchronized sound allowed the movies to talk.
This may not be the movie you would show to someone brand new to the silent era, nor is it the movie I would pick to introduce the majesty of Chaplin. But for silent cinema lovers, especially those who pack Chautauqua Auditorium’s silent series every summer, the restoration and home video release of A Woman of Paris is a welcome thing.
ON SCREEN: A Woman of Paris is available on Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection.