Charlie Chaplin’s 1923 film A Woman of Paris is a film full of
firsts. It was his first films released by United Artists, the company he had
co-founded four years earlier. It was his first dramatic film, featuring no
slapstick comedy at all and it was his first film in which he did not star. It
was also a film of lasts. After a fruitful eight year relationship, this was
Chaplin’s final film to feature Edna Purviance and it was also his last purely
dramatic picture. The movie was warmly received by critics who praised its bold
themes, underplayed acting and assured direction but for the public it was a
different matter. It’s difficult to quantify Chaplin’s appeal and fame for
modern audiences but up to that point no person in the movies was paid more. Upon
his first return to London
after his American success, literally hundreds of thousands of people turned
out to welcome him home. It is arguable that no entertainer has ever been as
famous as Charlie Chaplin was in the first half of the twentieth century.
So, when audiences eagerly
flocked to their cinemas in 1923 for the latest Chaplin feature only to find
that the man himself wasn’t on screen, it’s easy to understand their
disappointment. Imagine paying for another Pirates
of the Caribbean film only to discover that there was no Johnny Depp and no
pirates. Now image that the Pirate of the
Caribbean films were actually good and you get some understanding of the
disappointment audiences must have felt. To his credit, Chaplin did attempt to
get word out that this was going to be an atypical film with flyers handed out
to the long cinema queues and the film actually opens with a disclaimer stating
that “I do not appear in this picture” and that it is intended as a “serious
drama”. Had the audience been aware of this before the film opened, their
reaction might have been very different but instead it was a commercial failure
and wasn’t seen again for over fifty years when Chaplin reissued it with a new,
self composed score in what was to be the final piece of work before his death
in 1977.
