Watch A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate For Free

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I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors. It is hard to not expect a lot after not long before Chaplin had one of his earliest career highs in 'The Kid'. 'A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate' doesn't disappoint, and it shows Chaplin having properly found his style and fully settled. As said with many of his post-Keystone efforts, it shows a noticeable step up in quality though from his Keystone period, where he was still evolving and in the infancy of his long career. The Essanay and Mutual periods were something of Chaplin's adolescence period where his style had been found and starting to settle. After Mutual the style had properly settled and the cinematic genius emerged. Very much apparent here in 'A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate', which may not be one of Chaplin's best but it is to me one of his most under-appreciated.It is let down by the melodramatic ending that comes over too as silly and an interpolated music score composed not long before Chaplin's death that is intrusive and doesn't fit the film. On the other hand, 'A Woman of Fate: A Drama of Fate' looks great, from Essanay onwards, and it is certainly the case here, it was obvious that Chaplin was taking more time with his work and not churning out countless shorts in the same year of very variable success like he did with Keystone. It's actually one of his technically best-looking efforts from this period.'A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate' is also funny and very charming, never coming over as dull and never being too over-sentimental. It features some of Chaplin's most remarkable directing of any effort of his up to this point in his career. He similarly gets the best out of his cast, with the standouts being the ever charming and quite touching Edna Purviance and especially a superb Adolphe Menjou in a star-making turn. Concluding, very well done. 8/10 Bethany Cox

"A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate" left me with two certitudes: Chaplin is the greatest film-maker who ever lived, and the film, had it not been 'sold' as a Chaplin film, would probably stand today as one of the most influential movies ever. It's a sad irony that Chaplin's very popularity undermined the success of his first attempt on drama. The movie met with some critical acclaim but popularity was vital to ensure a lasting appeal. Time did justice to "A Woman of Paris" the place it would have occupied definitely belongs to Murnau's "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans".But it's never too late to appreciate an underrated gem, and I'm sure all the Chaplin's fans, after visioning the 'established' masterpieces, had the opportunity to finally discover his most underrated gem and enrich their appreciation of the film-maker, the dramatic film-maker. Speaking from my own experience, my discovery of the existence of "A Woman in Paris" happened the oddest way. I bought a DVD of "The Great Dictator" and was shocked to see this film instead. I probably had the same response than the audiences who expected the iconic Tramp and were immediately deceived by the opening statement warning that Chaplin doesn't appear (his cameo is hardly noticeable). In a way, I feel even guilty for not having given the film a chance, and waited almost four years before watching it, but Chaplin's aura was so immense I couldn't imagine a film from him and without him.Now, I'm not an expert in dramatic movies from the Silent Era but I'm sure that the craftsmanship Chaplin displayed in "A Woman of Paris" was ahead of its time and influenced many of his peers. I had reservations when the film started but they were immediately swept off by the quality of a poignant and emotional first act. The film opens with Marie St Clair, Edna Purviance as a woman living in a small French village. She's in love with Jean, an artist, played by Carl Miller to her father's disapproval. The father locks her door of her room but she joins Jean from the balcony during a rendezvous à la "Romeo and Juliet". Her father, infuriated, definitely locks her out of the house, it's up to Jean to find her a bed for the night, forever. The drama goes crescendo when Jean's parents disapprove the union and force the couple to leave the village. They go to a train station, Jean promises to follow her but another succession of events leads her to leave the village, without Jean.One year later, she became the mistress of a wealthy businessman, named Pierre Revel and played by Adolphe Menjou. I knew Menjou from his performance in "Paths of Glory", and if his devilish smile and cynical attitude, carried by an imitable mustache totally fitted his role as the villainous general, it was perfect for his role as the suave and debonair Revel. If there is one performance that stands alone in the film, it's Menjou's. Not to diminish the lead actors' merit, but they're obviously playing tormented people torn between their love and other demons. For instance, we never question how and why Marie became this woman, Chaplin leaves that to our interpretations through an efficient ellipse, but the narrative is so rich and constructed that we're literally absorbed by the story, and it's as the story progresses that we understand the story of Marie. The film depicts a slice of Paris' roaring twenties, in the zany post-war years, and Marie lived such a nightmarish life we might empathize with her desire to have a break. When one loses the love of his life, better to deliberately sink into the decadence of an easy life.Yet Marie ultimately meets Jean, and never the story goes into standard directions. Chaplin surprises us by illustrating the continual torment in both Marie and Jean's hearts, she loves him but she never seems not to enjoy her current life, he loves her, he is eager to marry her, but can't find the nerve to disappoint his mother, who doesn't like the way she is. For once, we have characters who act not according to their feelings, but under the influence of much higher and powerful forces, wealth and luxury, authority and maternal love. We never doubt about their love, but we never take it for granted that they will walk together into the sunset at the end. Chaplin made a drama and sticks to it without overplaying it, which makes the emotional parts even more powerful, and he shows a remarkable screen writing talent, proving that silent movies can also benefit from the use of the right words at the right time.To laud the technical achievement, this review could cover every part of the film-making process: writing, directing, editing, but I mostly want to praise the triumph of storytelling that Chaplin demonstrated. I guess it's the mark of the real talent when a comedic actor proves his ease with drama as well as comedy, Woody Allen could also handle both genres with the same skills, except with dialogs, while Chaplin shows emotions through characters, on looks and body languages, and it's extraordinary how even one look can be translated in many words, characters look like archetypes but they're never three-dimensional.For the trivia, I read that the film was meant to leverage Edna Purviance's career, to prove that she could succeed without Chaplin. It didn't work because she wasn't talented, but because circumstances forced her to leave the business. Yet the scene-stealing performance of Menjou carries half the enjoyment. There is something of Menjou in Dujardin's last performance in "The Artist", but the comparison ends here, the film was a homage to silent movies, but it may have contributed to the idea that silent movies were just made of gestures and flat love stories. Rightfully, "A Woman of Paris" contradicts those clichés.

Charlie Chaplin's only completely straight drama that he directed but did not star in was a flop in its day, and due to its anomalous status has not fared especially well in later years either. Nevertheless it has had its champions, like British director Michael Powell and Swedish actress and director Liv Ullmann, and is hailed in some quarters as being as sensational and innovative as his comedies.However a look at the formal style of A Woman of Paris shows much more simply an assured yet conventional grasp of film form, consistent with Hollywood production of the time. As in his comedies, Chaplin shows an intelligent handling of space and arrangement. In those early shots he gives a cramped feeling by having side walls visible up to the edge of the frame and foreground objects like the bed in Edna Purviance's room leaving little room for manoeuvre. An honourable mention goes here to the cinematography of Roland Totheroh which resembles Rembrandt lighting in all but one aspect – the slight level of clarity in the darkness (as oppose to full shadow) gives a very real feeling of squalor to those opening scenes. Chaplin also makes great use of background and foreground, minimising cuts by having multiple characters in the shot at once. Often there is emotional acting up front with physical acting out back. This is all superb, but it is hardly ground-breaking for the period, nor is it particularly surprising to anyone who has studied Chaplin's other works.The plot of A Woman of Paris too is a fairly routine melodrama, with many twists that are clichéd and hard-to-swallow. Its condemnation of the excesses of wealthy socialites could almost have been borrowed from one of Mr DeMille's moral crusades. This being Chaplin however its depictions are generally a little more sensitive and humane than the average, and while we do have that hackneyed device of a man ruined by an unfaithful woman, in this case the woman is herself a more or less innocent victim of a callous playboy, and her reasons for her lack of fidelity to one man are at least given some empathetic explanation.However, A Woman of Paris's melodrama, in spite of its formulaic structure, has a kind of truth-to-life that most other melodramas fail to achieve. Chaplin draws from his cast some steady, measured performances, free from the overt gesture and strained mugging of your typical silent picture. The emoting is clearly stated, yet it is never overstated. The wonderfully restrained Adolphe Menjou makes the best job of this, underplaying everything with a kind of suaveness which makes us believe women could be attracted to him in spite of his being a repellent bounder. Purviance is great too, always having been a competent straight woman to Charlie's funny man, now sticking to a languid pace and letting the emotions drift on and off her face. It's also nice to see Henry Bergman, probably the most professional of Chaplin's regular players, making a bit part and adding just a little note of the ridiculous without violating the drama. Amongst the other cast members, all of whom are now forgotten, no-one exactly stands out, but by the same token none of them shows themselves up with a bad job.And while, like most Hollywood pictures of the time, A Woman of Paris is a little excessive with the intertitles, Chaplin rarely uses words to give anything away. Moments such as the young artist realising Purviance has another man in her life are revealed with sequences of visual clues, giving them an incredible smoothness and forcing us to really pay attention to those subtle reactions. Then there are those little touches of genius, those moments that separate the truly great filmmakers from the merely good, such as Purviance slowing down when she encounters a gendarme after hastily retrieving her necklace. With A Woman of Paris Chaplin, with his typical mix of unpretentiousness and devoted humanism, dives shamelessly into the lowest depths of melodrama, whilst giving to that genre a sprinkling of the dignity and honesty it so often lacks.

The second film in my somewhat unusual Charles Chaplin double feature (after the delightfully black 'Monsieur Verdoux (1947)'), 'A Woman of Paris' is perhaps the silent comedy master's least mentioned film, perhaps partly due to it not actually being a comedy, or because Chaplin himself appears only in a very brief cameo role. His first and, I'll venture, his only strictly dramatic feature, the film traces the romantic dilemma of a young French woman living in Paris. It was Chaplin's first film with United Artists – which he had founded in 1919 with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith. Originally entitled 'Public Opinion' and then 'Destiny,' Chaplin considered a dozen more titles before he finally settled on a name.Marie St. Clair (Edna Purviance) and her romance Jean Millet (Clarence Geldart), an aspiring artist, residents of a small French village, have plans to move to Paris and get married. However, unfortunate circumstances delay their plans, and Marie impulsively boards the train without Jean. A year or so later, Marie has assimilated into the upper-class lifestyle of Paris, having become the mistress of a wealthy, cynical businessman, Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou). It is then that she and Jean suddenly meet again. Though there are undoubtedly still feelings between them, Marie must decide whether she can sacrifice all of Pierre's luxuries to pursue the man that she loves.Written, produced and directed by Chaplin, 'A Woman of Paris' is a tightly-paced drama/romance, employing a lot of dialogue (somewhat unusual for Chaplin, who usually relied on extended slapstick comedic set pieces to drive his silent films) and a three-way relationship that has since become commonplace in films of this sort. The film allowed Chaplin to extend his skills beyond the realm of the lovable little Tramp. Unfortunately, this seemingly was not what audiences wanted. Perhaps perceived as a harmful satire of the American way of life, 'A Woman of Paris' was banned in several US states on the grounds of immorality, and it was a commercial flop. Chaplin had conceived the film as a means of launching the individual acting career of Edna Purviance, though this bid was unsuccessful. It did, however, make an international star of Adolphe Menjou.Many critics, despite the poor box office performance, praised the film's startling realism. Notably, director Michael Powell ('Black Narcissus,' 'Peeping Tom') cited 'A Woman of Paris' as his greatest inspiration to become a filmmaker. In 1976, a frail Charles Chaplin – just one year before his death – reissued the edited film with a new musical score he had composed, aided by music arranger Eric James. A criminally underrated silent classic, 'A Woman of Paris' is yet another testament to Chaplin's undeniable cinematic genius.