Charles Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris was one of the most influential films of the silent era, occupying a place somewhat equivalent to Citizen Kane in the period of talking films. Yet paradoxically it remains the least known of the handful of undisputed classics. For more than half a century its maker declined to reissue it, so that the mould of myth has begun to gather. Only a year or so before his death in 1977 was he persuaded to relent. The still pristine negative was brought out and Chaplin, as the final work of his creative life, composed a new synchronous score.
At the time he made the film, Chaplin was working with intense concentration. He completed work on The Pilgrim on 25 September 1922; but the studio records date the commencement of A Woman of Paris on 15 August 1922. Since shooting did not begin until the end of November, this date may indicate the start of Chaplin’s work on the story.
In his autobiography he explains that he had wanted to make a film to launch Edna Purviance, his faithful leading lady through nine years and three dozen films, as a dramatic actress. “Although Edna and I were emotionally estranged, I was still interested in her career. But looking objectively at Edna, I realised she was growing rather matronly, which would not be suitable. The feminine conceit is often necessary for my future pictures.” As suitable roles, Chaplin considered Euripides’ The Trojan Women and then Josephine, although the Empress did not provide the role he was seeking for Purviance, it did fire an idea for a film on himself; he then began the voyage into a Napoleonic project. Then he was induced by friends (perhaps the movie star Hope Hampton, who later made The Love of Sunya in 1927, by the director Marshall Neilan). Peggy Hopkins Joyce (who began a romantic notoriety when she became the teenage bride of a barber, then became a Ziegfeld girl and went on to marry five millionaires). Chaplin describes his relationship with Peggy as “bizarre, though brief.” He recalls her anecdotes, particularly some of her anecdotes about an association with a “well-known French publisher”, gave him the idea for A Woman of Paris.
Between August and November Chaplin worked on the scenario. His original notes – which Lady Chaplin has generously allowed me to examine – show the story progressing through many stages of development, several alternative endings, and the elimination of superfluous scenes, until finally arriving at the refined, spare, elliptical structure of the eventual film. The press of the time were deeply impressed by Chaplin’s statement that the film was shot without a script, as was the case with D. W. Griffith, though this is somewhat misleading. The story is in some way that there was nothing in any way improvisational about the making of the film. Evidently by the time Chaplin came to shoot, the form and detail were so precisely worked out in his mind that a conventional shooting script would have been merely a superfluous and even distracting formality. A shooting record (which is also preserved by Lady Chaplin) indicates how definite was the conception, once shooting was begun. Only two of the scenes shot were not used; while a couple of other scenes were filmed in slightly variant forms. The long circulated legend that an alternative tragic ending was shot for distribution in continental Europe seems unfounded.
A Woman of Paris was shot in almost continuous sequence continuity. The first take of the opening scene of the film was made in the afternoon of 22 November 1922; the final scene of the film was shot on the afternoon of 25 June 1923. Some material was filmed as supplementary versions and used subsequently during additional and limited showings or occasionally the film would be interrupted for a few days or a week; being changed along with the replacement of sets in the Chaplin studios where all interiors were shot, and perhaps for any necessary story revision.
The film opens in a little French village. Marie St Clair and Jean Millet are lovers, but Marie’s stern father has locked her in so that they may not leave. Jean helps her to escape through the window, but on her return she finds that she is now locked out. She runs to the house of her uncle, where in turn her father forbids Marie the house: Jean decides to leave for Paris together; but when Jean returns home he finds his father dead. Jean writes Marie waiting at the railway station, about his father dead. Marie totally misunderstands his uncompleted explanation, and leaves with the uncle alone.
A year later, Paris has transformed her. She is now the elegant and brilliant mistress of a wealthy industrialist and moves about town. Marie’s wistful ambitions of marriage, children and respectability are dashed by the news that Pierre is to be married. As an ironic gesture of convenience. At this juncture she chances to meet Jean, who since his father’s death has arrived in Paris to work as a painter. Marie commissions him to paint her portrait. As their friendship grows once more, she becomes more disillusioned with life with Pierre.
Jean proposes marriage. Marie accepts, but then overhears him telling his parents, anxious mother that he does not mean to go through with it, and proposes to break it off. The next day, the now unhappy Marie returns to Pierre. He refuses to see Jean, now remorseful and desperate. Jean forces a confrontation with Pierre and Marie in an elegant restaurant. There is a scene; and then humiliated Jean goes out; and shoots himself. His body is taken to his uncle’s and his frantic parents rush up his stairs in their search of Marie. Failing to find her, she returns home and her father, in the very room where Jean had been, is Marie weeping in the shadow of Jean.
Chaplin considered many alternative endings before settling on the present one which shows Marie and the now reformed and dedicated thing their lives to orphaned children in the country. In the closing scene she is walking past the blackboard of a farm cart with a little boy. At that moment Pierre’s car races by in the opposite direction. Neither is aware of the other. “By the way,” asks Pierre’s secretary, “whatever happened to Marie St Clair?” Pierre shrugs.
Chaplin called the film A Drama of Fate—the first title for the film was in fact Destiny; in later stages of the work it was called Public Opinion and The Immortal Woman—and the plot constantly depends upon chance: the father’s importunate death; the accidental meeting of Marie and Jean; the overheard conversation. The plot however—which would have served any of these melodramas of Chaplin’s London youth—is of much less significance than the characters he portrayed and the style he invented to portray them.
When the film was prepared for reissue, Chaplin took the opportunity for some imperceptible re-editing. At the same time he seems to have eliminated the original foreword, which he may have considered too dated. It ran “Humanity is composed not of heroes and villains, but of men and women, and all their passions, both 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.”
For the audience of 1923, as the press notices reveal, it was startling to see a film which showed a courtesan as sympathetic, a playboy as charming, intelligent, tolerant and generous, a mother who was jealous and vindictive, a hero who was weak and mother-smothered.
Today it is only by going back to the original reviews that we can gather an idea of how startlingly realistic the characters and their emotions in fact seemed to the audiences of 1923. It is remarkable—particularly if we make comparisons with even the most sophisticated acting of other films of the period—that the playing of Edna Purviance and Adolphe Menjou, even without allowance for the fact that the film is silent, still appears undated and valid.
Chaplin could not rely on such responsive and supple collaborators in the secondary roles, for which he had to depend on often over-experienced professionals. He appears to have been particularly dissatisfied with the actress in the small but demanding role of Jean’s mother, Lydia Knott—then only fifty years old, and the mother of W. S. Hart’s best director Lambert Hillyer—was a serviceable dramatic actress, but irretrievably committed to old conventions. Chaplin however succeeds to marvellous effect in restraining her theatricality. In one scene where she receives the news of her son’s suicide. She begins what would have been a throughout quiet questioning by the police—her movements restrained, her face greater emotional effect than in her more dramatically dramatised moments. Even actors were impressed by Chaplin’s achievement. The correspondent of Motion Picture News wrote of Jean’s death scene’s greatest merit, “the suspense is largely psychological. As one actor said to me, “Chaplin’s picture is the first that ever made me weep ‘em all, up till now, Griffith and Lubitsch can join hands and jump into the ocean without being missed.””
Chaplin’s innovations went much further than the performances. He extended the particular allusive quality of his gag comedy and his vaudeville-taught precision of mise en scène to dramatic purposes. Individual scenes have of course become part of film legend—the lights of the unseen train that flash across Marie’s face as she stands on the station platform (achieving production economy and potent emotional suggestion all in one); the censor-proof indication of Pierre and Marie’s relationship merely by the proprietorial way that Menjou takes a hairdresser’s from a drawer in Marie’s room.
Another celebrated scene well illustrates how much such pieces of business Chaplin illuminates the progress of relationships with exact economical precision, and why, after Marie has rejected the portrait, Jean comes to visit her. When he helps her select a suitable gown. Remembering her own life at the village, he begins to blush and grows uneasy as she produces a succession of glamorous costumes. She asks a maid to get an accessory—a scarf—from a drawer. As the maid pulls out the scarf, a man’s wing collar falls from the drawer. Jean sees it. Marie notices neither the collar nor Jean’s recognition of the manner of her life and the source of her wardrobe. Even without the lighting flash revelation that such scenes provided for the audience of 1923, this method of storytelling still retains, for present-day spectators, its brilliance, its power and its uniqueness.
Chaplin’s contemporaries credited him with definitively defining within the silent screen the comedy of manners. In the half century during which the film declined into legend, this aspect of its influence has sometimes been overlooked. DeMille had pointed out as early as 1927 that he and Lubitsch as nearly exact contemporaries had both worked in the field. But DeMille, though his subjects were taken mostly from the mores of the times—or at best morals—while many sequences of his new-fangled innovations still remained more experimental. It is only now, with later films, like Why Change Your Wife and The Affairs of Anatol depend on plot and theme rather than on subtle interpretations of character through behaviour.
Lubitsch’s method is much closer to Chaplin’s and was, certainly, anticipated in his German works, like Die Flamme. But The Marriage Circle, which first revealed ‘the Lubitsch touch’ to the United States, was released only six months after A Woman of Paris; and was almost certainly begun after Lubitsch had seen Chaplin’s film. Herman G. Weinberg, who is not lacking in loyalty to either artist, states: “After completing Rosita, Lubitsch saw Chaplin’s epochal A Woman of Paris, which was to change the whole course of screen direction in one area—the comedy of manners, which, up to that time, had been the special preserve of Cecil B. DeMille… He [Lubitsch] was absolutely bouleversé by the Chaplin film.”
A Woman of Paris had a more direct progeny, also. Edward Sutherland, who was assistant director, worked in an allusive style noticeably influenced by Chaplin’s film when he made his own début as a director in 1925. Monta Bell, credited as editorial supervisor, developed a directly comparable style of observational comedy in his films, starting with The Snob (1924) and The King on Main Street. The two French research assistants also became directors in their own right. Jean de Limur went on to be assistant to Rex Ingram before directing Jeanne Eagles in two films of 1929, The Lake and Jealousy. The debt of Henri d’Abbadie d’Arraste’s Service for Ladies and A Gentleman of Paris (both 1927) was emphasised by the presence of Adolphe Menjou, whose already established career was given definitive shape by his man-about-town role in A Woman of Paris. It is impossible precisely to assess what must have been its influence upon such a director as Malcolm St Clair, but the debt of The Grand Duchess and the Waiter is very evident. We have Michael Powell’s own testimony that his determination to work in the cinema was settled on the day he played hookey from his mundane office job to see A Woman of Paris. “I reckoned that if the film was capable of this sort of subtlety, it was the medium for me.”
Few films in history have been more confidently and rapturously heralded as masterpieces on their first appearance. The press acclamation was the same all over the world. The irony and the trouble was that when the public at large were told that their beloved comic idol, Charlie, had made Great Art, that the film was tragic, and that he wasn’t even in it (apart from a brief walk-on as a porter, heavily disguised) they stayed away. Chaplin must have been shocked and understandably disappointed when for the first time one of his pictures lost money; and, as producer, unconsoled by the awareness that the film was in many respects before its time.
More than fifty years afterwards, when he was finally persuaded to let audiences see the film again, he seems to have feared that it would now come after its time, that audiences of the 1970s would no longer be sympathetic to the characters, the performances and the sentiments (hence presumably the omission of the original foreword). Any such fears were needless, as the New York notices—if anything more adulatory than those of the critics of 1923—alone were to prove.
After fifty-seven years, the narrative skill, the belief, the reality of the performances and the intensity of the octogenarian artist’s new musical leitmotivs (rooted in nineteenth century theatre music of the Enfant Prodigue school) were shown still to command their audience.
Sight & Sound, Autumn 1980, pp. 221-223
