A Woman of Paris (Charles Chaplin Productions, United Artists, 1923)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

“Humanity is composed not of heroes and villains, but of men and women, and all their passions, good and bad, have been given them by God. They sin only in blindness, and the ignorant condemn their mistakes, but the wise pity them.”

– Charles Chaplin, printed foreword to A Woman of Paris (included in the original 1923 release but deleted from the 1978 reissue)

Last night’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” on Turner Classic Movies was a film I quite wanted to see, and as it turned out my husband Charles and I watched it together: A Woman of Paris, made in 1923 and written, directed and produced by Charlie Chaplin (actually “Charles Chaplin,” which was how he billed himself on his more “serious” projects) but without him as star. The version currently circulating on TCM and wherever else this quite intriguing movie has been revived was one Chaplin prepared for re-release shortly before his death in 1977 (a bad year for celebrities because it was also the year Bing Crosby, Groucho Marx, Maria Callas and Elvis Presley died), with an added musical score (featuring at least one cue Chaplin composed for Monsieur Verdoux, another French-set drama and another of Chaplin’s rare flops) and, regrettably, some internal editing. While he didn’t cut the film as brutally as he did with his 1920 film The Kid (for which the 67-minute version in the public domain is far better than the 54-minute reissue version authorized by Chaplin and his estate), he did remove a hauntingly beautiful foreword Chaplin wrote for the original release of A Woman of Paris, which was printed only in Theodore Huff’s 1947 Chaplin biography (reissued with an update by the publisher in 1964, after Huff’s death, to coincide with the impending publication of Chaplin’s own autobiography in 1965). I remember it began, “Humanity consists not of heroes and villains, but of men and women,” and it ended with a call for pity for the characters.

A Woman of Paris began as an attempt by Chaplin to launch a serious acting career for his leading lady, Edna Purviance, who’d appeared as his romantic lead (or desperate crush object) in virtually all his comedies for Essanay, Mutual and First National between 1915 and 1922. But Chaplin thought Purviance was getting too old for such roles and he wanted to showcase her in a serious drama that would show off her acting chops and get her sought after by other producers. Accordingly, he concocted a story called “A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate,” and cast Purviance as Marie St. Clair, a young French farm girl with an insanely strict father (Clarence Geldert) who locks her in his home to keep her from running away to Paris with her boyfriend, aspiring artist Jean Millet (Carl Miller). When she finally escapes her father’s imprisonment, Marie meets Jean and they plan to leave for Paris the next morning – only to find that her dad has essentially disowned her and has now locked her out. Jean tells Marie she can spend the night at his place, and his mom (Lydia Knott) is sympathetic – but Jean’s father (Charles French) is as hostile to Marie as her own dad was and won’t allow her to spend the night in his house even though the plan was for them to sleep in separate rooms. Marie dashes off to the railway station where she and Jean planned to take a train to Paris that night, but their efforts to run off together are sandbagged when Jean’s father suddenly has a heart attack (or something) and dies that night.

Marie goes on to Paris alone, as shown by the reflections of the lights of the train windows as they pass her while she waits until the train stops and she can get on. While she’s waiting a porter, played in an unbilled cameo by Chaplin himself, walks in and drops a heavy trunk. (Decades later, in A Countess from Hong Kong – the only other film in which Chaplin was the writer and director but not the star – he again played a porter in a brief scene in which he drops a heavy trunk.) Then the film leaps ahead a year and shows that Marie has joined the demi-monde and become the mistress of Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou in his first major film role), wealthiest bachelor in Paris. Pierre is introduced at an elaborate, lavish party where champagne truffles (“a delicacy for pigs and gentlemen,” Chaplin’s wryly witty title says) are being served and another pair of guests is a wealthy white-haired woman and her gigolo partner. One of the guests wraps himself in a full-length scarf that was the only thing a female guest was wearing – and while we don’t get to see more than a hint of her naked body, we get her embarrassment as she flees behind a screen where she can put something on. Marie enjoys the luxury of being Pierre’s mistress more than she likes Pierre – at one point he takes her close friend Paulette (Malvina Polo, who also played the mentally retarded daughter of counterfeiter Cesare Gravina in Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives) to dinner instead, and at another point the magazines announce Pierre’s impending marriage to an heiress and bill it as the union of two great fortunes. This stops Marie off right there even though Pierre tells her they can keep seeing each other regardless.

Just then Jean turns up in Paris, accompanied by his mother, and he gets the job of painting Marie’s portrait. Though she poses for him dressed to the nines in the various gowns Pierre and his money have bought her, Jean paints her in the costume of the simple farm girl she had been and explains, “I liked you better in the past.” Marie is torn between the life of luxury the well-heeled Pierre has given her and the simple joys of “a real home, babies, and a man's respect” she was hoping for with Jean. Alas, Jean’s mother makes him promise her that he will never marry Marie – and Marie overhears this. Jean is torn not only between his love for Marie and his promise to his mother, but by depression and uncertainty: we see him load a revolver and pick a fight with Pierre at one of the fancy restaurants where much of this film takes place, and then go out into the courtyard of the place (which is dominated by a fountain whose centerpiece is a statue of a naked woman) so he can shoot himself. Chaplin carefully kept the actual suicide off-screen, though in this sound version he included the sound of a shot, and we see Jean fall into the fountain and a doctor pronounces him dead. Then, after another cut indicating the passage of a major amount oif time, Marie returns to the farm village where she grew up and resumes her old life, helping taking care of other people’s kids and with a priest as her only male friend. In the film’s famous final scene, Pierre is driving past the farm village and his car passes by the horse-drawn cart in which Marie is riding, and his friend asks him, “By the way, whatever happened to Marie St. Clair?” Pierre, of course, says he has no idea.

The film was a commercial flop – according to imdb.com, its production cost was $351,000 and its worldwide gross was only $11,233 (earlier I had read it was a box-office disappointment but not such a total disaster), and among the people most disappointed in it were Chaplin’s partners in United Artists, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. They had been waiting patiently for Chaplin to complete his 1918 contract with First National so he could make a blockbuster comedy hit that would bring much-needed revenue into United Artists’ coffers. Instead he made A Woman of Paris, and the UA partners had to wait two more years before Chaplin finally delivered a comedy, The Gold Rush, which was a huge hit. It didn’t launch a serious acting career for Edna Purviance – three years later Chaplin would try again, hiring Josef von Sternberg to direct her in a film alternately called The Sea Gull and A Woman of the Sea, but he shelved it and a few years later destroyed the negative and all prints rather than keep paying taxes on an unreleased (and, largely because of the industry’s transition to sound film, unreleasable) movie. But Chaplin kept Purviance on a pension that lasted until her death in 1963.

Purviance’s rather matronly screen presence, even dolled up to the nines in clothes that drag queens then or now would have died for, is hard to accept. The film would no doubt have been better with Gloria Swanson or Greta Garbo in the role. As it is, it is Menjou that takes the acting honors, launching him on a film career in which he got cast again and again as an amoral cad whose money insulated him from the consequences of his deeds. Theodore Huff’s Chaplin biography claimed that Chaplin shot an alternate ending in which Marie returns to Pierre after Jean’s suicide and released this version in Europe under the title Public Opinion (after changing the working title from Destiny, perhaps because Fritz Lang’s film Der Müde Tod – literally “The Weary Death” – had been released in the U.S. as Destiny two years earlier), and Chaplin himself ridiculed the American ending (the one we have), saying to friends, “How do we know Marie is going to stay on the farm more than 10 minutes after the film ends?” But A Woman of Paris is a quite extraordinary movie, full of wit and subtleties we usually don’t associate with silent films, and much more adventurously directed than most of Chaplin’s comedies.

It affected Ernst Lubitsch, who after a promising career in Germany directing mostly historical spectaculars saw A Woman of Paris right after the financial failure of his own first U.S. movie, the Mary Pickford vehicle Rosita, and decided the envelope-pushing romantic comedy-drama of A Woman of Paris would be a viable career path for him both artistically and commercially. (It was.) It’s also one of the great ironies of Hollywood history that Adolphe Menjou, one of the movie industry’s most fanatical Right-wingers and a member of the pro-blacklist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, in which capacity he testified for days before the House Un-American Activities Committee enthusiastically naming names of actual or suspected Communists, would have got his career boost from unabashed Leftist and ultimate blacklist victim Charlie Chaplin, who was actually barred from returning to the United States in 1953 over his politics. (Earlier I’ve argued a parallel between Chaplin and John Lennon, both British-born artistic geniuses who raised the popularity of the genres they worked in – movies in Chaplin’s case and rock music in Lennon’s – and ran afoul of U.S. immigration authorities over their politics – though Lennon, unlike Chaplin, won his legal battle and was allowed to stay.) I’ve also noted an intriguing parallel between A Woman of Paris and Woody Allen’s 1978 film Interiors, also a serious drama made by a writer-director-star best known for comedies and also a box-office flop – and Chaplin and Allen have parallels in that they achieved a unique blend of comedy and pathos, both won the admiration of intellectual film critics, and both were jeopardized by sex scandals involving underage or barely legal partners.