Belated Gift
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
A WOMAN OF PARIS
Directed and Written by Charles Chaplin
THE GENTLEMAN TRAMP Directed and Written by Richard Patterson
It is a simple story: a provincial boy and girl fall in love despite their parents' objections and plan to elope to Paris. His father dies as they are about to leave, and the girl, not knowing why he missed the train, goes on without him--to become Adolphe Menjou's lavishly kept woman in the capital. Later they meet, there is promise of love's renewal, but circumstances and her lover's priggishness intervene. Tragedy and then a coda at once ironic and uplifting end the picture.
If that summary sounds oldtimey, it should, for it outlines a silent film made in 1923. It failed then, largely because its writer-director did not also star in it, there being no place in the movie for a sweet little tramp. Now A Woman of Paris can be seen for what it is: one of the loveliest expressions of Charles Chaplin's genius a sort of last gift from that troublesome man turned legend.
The film was made as a vehicle for Edna Purviance, the female lead in 35 early Chaplin comedies and, it seems, the first great love of his life. It beautifully suits her talent, for she makes the transformation from the naive country girl to the worldly courtesan (and back again) with ease. Better still, the woman she becomes has a way of flashing glimpses of the girl she once was that is very touching, mostly because it is so effortless and unselfconscious.
But it is, of course, what the movie tells us about Chaplin that interests us the most. One of the several good things about Richard Patterson's neatly made compilation-documentary, The Gentleman Tramp, is the way it juxtaposes scenes from Chaplin's pictures and autobiographical material. What one gathers from viewing the Patterson film and A Woman of Paris is that the two male figures in the latter represent two contradictory sides of Chaplin's nature, which he tried to gloss over. Purviance's first love is an artist, but rather a bourgeois one. His mother shares his garret with him, and his paintings, like his dress and manner, are rather staid. He sentimentalizes virtue, just as Chaplin did in the soppier passages of his own work. As the documentary makes clear, Chaplin himself aspired all his life to the kind of stability this stiff youth aspires to. In his marriage to Oona O'Neill, which produced a family of Victorian dimensions, Chaplin finally found it. On the other hand, as three decades of scandalized headlines made clear, he was a boulevardier as dandified, as natty, as Menjou is here. Chaplin invests this character with real charm and style, again hoping for understanding.
Not that one should attend A Woman of Paris out of biographical curiosity.
It has the grace of a comedy-romance by Ernst Lubitsch, who is said to have been much influenced by it. There is a wonderful moment, for example, when a piqued Purviance tosses an ill-gotten string of pearls out a window to prove her conversion from materialism -- and then rushes into the street to retrieve it from the beggar who has picked it up.
Later she is being massaged while hearing unpleasant gossip from a friend. All moral comment is communicated through the changing rhythms of the masseuse's hands, the dourly disapproving expressions on her face.
Like Lubitsch's work, the surface of this film is knowing, but it is never truly cynical. Love, it says, is expressed in many ways; and dying for it, as the young artist finally does, is not necessarily nobler than expressing it with a well-creased trouser leg when you go calling, which is Menjou's way of putting the matter. In a technically subtle yet simple way that eluded him in later films, Chaplin was saying something about his view of the world, and of himself, that he could not say when he was wearing baggy pants. A Woman of Paris is no less a masterpiece than The Gold Rush, and for its time, maybe for all time, it is a much more daring work of art.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.