Charlie Chaplin's A Woman of Paris reviewed – archive, 1925

Mr. Charles Spenser Chaplin has been enjoying a holiday from his boots and his hat. It has been a holiday in the true sense, which implies, not idleness, but the doing of a thing long desired in the desired way. His new film A Woman of Paris is the fruit of many years’ consideration, the logical development of that other holiday The Kid, and the fulfilment of his dream.

Like all good comedians, pushing aside a delirious desire to play Hamlet, Chaplin has sought a medium of tragic expression, cast here and everywhere, for an outlet for his serious emotions. His later comedies are shot with the Hamlet quality. But he is bounded by the little hat, and the boots and the cane, and a servant to the public in whose mind these things stand for laughter. So Mr. Charles Chaplin, goaded desperate by his own popularity, has sloughed off Charlie the comedian with all his insignia, and made the film of his ambitions alone. Comedian Charlie walks once across the set in the disguise of a railway porter carrying a trunk. But with this short intrusion A Woman of Paris is played by Edna Purviance and Adolphe Menjou, and a number of memorable “types” to throw them into relief. Chaplin himself is invisible behind the megaphone.

As a document of the less happy emotions A Woman of Paris has justified itself completely. All the tense of waste and impotence, of misunderstanding and distortion, all the tawdry and petty things, the ironical and cruel things that are the underside of pleasure, seem to have found a place in the story. It is not pretty. Chaplin never meant it to be. But it is horribly true.

He tells his story, as always, drily and allusively. His characters seem to improvise, to make their points spontaneously, with a complete absence of screen-consciousness. Yet the least movement of the finger has been minutely studied, considered, and rehearsed. To Chaplin the producer the angle of a truffle-dish, the fullness of a wine-glass, is a matter of intense importance. Even the detectives of fiction have not excelled his precision. He has made screen pantomime an exact science, specialising in allusion and suggestion, the small hint of the vast thing unseen, and speaking with a new vocabulary in which inanimate objects – food, furniture, clothing – play a large and explanatory part. He believes in brevity, in the one telling shot in place of the ineffectual six. He believes that each scene should be a perfect and rounded whole. He believes in economy. Take, for instance, the passing of the Paris train in A Woman of Paris. It is the turning-point of the heroine’s career. But we do not see the train: we watch the reflection of its lights moving across the station wall and illumining the girl’s face. Later, in Paris, we find her in luxury. No word is spoken, but when an immaculate gentleman, calling to take her out to dine, strolls into her boudoir and takes a large handkerchief out of a drawer, the relationship settles itself. And the dominant note of the film is struck in the three opening shots, which show, in approaching sequence, a dreary house with a girl’s face pressed against an upper window. No, Chaplin wastes no words and no celluloid. The really important things happen “off.” His genius lies in the power to draw a character so vividly by showing its relation to everyday affairs that every member of the audience will supply for himself its right reaction to matters of moment. Chaplin makes the spectator’s imagination a creative force in all his drama.

Telling the Old, Old Story
It was a very serious Mr. Chaplin who conceived the film, and a serious Mr. Chaplin who evolved its technique – serious in spite of the frequent sallies of typical Chaplinesque humour, – but the Mr. Chaplin who chose the story material must have done so with his tongue in his cheek. He selected the oldest and most hackneyed theme in the kinema, and determined to give it, for the first, and only time, life. (Whether it is worth vivifying is beside the point. Chaplin at least thought that it was.) A stock formula has arisen for treating the story of the country lovers, parted by misunderstanding, the lure of the city, the seductive villain with a flat at any lady’s disposal, the reappearance of the country lover, and his forgiveness of the girl’s indiscretion. But Chaplin, accepting the story, discards the formula. He sets out to show just what would happen under these circumstances in real life – how such characters would develop under, and govern, their conditions – how the trivialities of life would intermingle with the drama, pressing in close and stifling. He presents the loneliness of it all. He has found a tragedy in the most unexpected place in the world, the bare bones of stock melodrama.

His heroine Marie is unvirtuous from the first, his hero impotent and indeterminate, his villain a delightful fellow who finds life a huge joke and lets it touch him very lightly. When his mistress upbraids him he plays the saxophone; when she tells him she is leaving him for ever he says “Well, phone me sometime” and saunters out, with every sympathy in the audience at his back. Given such characters, the foolish story of the misunderstanding, the gay life in town, the hesitation between the two lovers becomes possible and human. The weak hero shoots himself; he would have done no other. The villain lives happily ever after, and the film closes with a view of him in his motor rolling along a country road. A farmer’s cart jogs towards him. In the cart is Marie. But neither sees the other: the cart and the motor pass and part. “By the way,” asks his secretary, “what became of Marie St. Clair?” The other shrugs and smiles.

A Woman of Paris is a remarkable film, an historic film, a film to see and consider. But, it is wintry, and not everyone will find it to his liking. So for consolation I will add that Mr. Chaplin, having enjoyed his holiday to the full,has now gone back again to the boots and cane, and there will be no more Hamlets by proxy for a consider able time to trouble our sluggard imaginations.

CA Lejeune: the pioneering female film critic who changed our view of cinema