A Woman of Paris on AllMovie

For his first United Artists release, Charles Chaplin boldly offered a film which he directed but did not star in. A Woman of Paris stars Chaplin's favorite leading lady Edna Purviance as Marie St. Clair, a young French lass who plans to elope with the man she loves. Marie's father is so taken aback by this that he dies of a heart attack. Overcome with grief and guilt, Marie travels to Paris alone, where within a year she has "lost" herself by becoming the mistress of roue Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou). By accident, she is reunited with her former boyfriend Jean Millet (Carl Miller), now an artist. She hires him to paint her portrait in all her new finery; he stubbornly paints her in the simple country frocks that she'd worn before coming to Paris. Despite her "fall", Jean still wants to marry Marie, but promises his mother (Lydia Knott) that he won't. Frustrated, Jean kills himself, whereupon his mother grabs a pistol and sets out to kill Marie. The old woman weakens in her resolve when she sees Marie weeping over Jean's body. A year passes: as Revel casually wonders what became of Marie, we see that the sadder-but-wiser girl has returned to the country to live with Jean's mother. Though the story could have been maudlin in the wrong hands, Chaplin imbues A Woman of Paris with a delicately sophisticated touch, anticipating the Lubitsch style by several years. Many of his directorial innovations were quickly adopted by others, so that what seemed revolutionary in 1923 now appears to be trite and cliched. Though he didn't star, Chaplin does appear in the film, heavily disguised as a railroad porter. A Woman of Paris was no blockbuster, but the strength of the Chaplin name enabled the film to make a comfortable profit.