On demand: "A Woman of Paris"

Chaplin's short comedies had made him such a big star by 1923 that he had to insert a title card into the opening credits of A Woman of Paris, his feature-length directorial debut, pointing out that this romantic melodrama would be the first of his works in which he would not personally be appearing. In some respects, he was lying: Chaplin has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as a railway porter, removed of his familiar Tramp get-up. Still, his fanbase weren't to know this, and you do wonder if any patrons of the time, drawn to the nickelodeon by the prospect of seeing a small man kicking a bigger man up the arse and then running away, let slip a disappointed "aw" before hastening to the exit; or whether the guarantee of seeing something Chaplinesque, albeit sans Chaplin himself, was still enough to keep them seated. (It's not as though the auditorium would have been over-subscribed; the film's commercial failure led Chaplin to suppress all prints until the late 1970s, by which time his legacy had been secured.) In the Chaplin filmography, this is something like his Interiors, the point at which a funnyman artist removes himself from the frame so as to assert the seriousness of his art - to impress upon us that he is no mere comedian - and to turn that frame over to unhappy women in his absence. Here the unhappy woman is Edna Purviance's provincial gal Marie, introduced being turfed out of her childhood home and separated from artist beau Jean (Carl Miller) en route to the big city, as if she were lost luggage. Once resettled, Marie takes up with cad-slash-bounder Adolphe Menjou, only to be reunited with Jean at a later date, precipitating a crisis of heart.

In its vision of guileless young lovers separated - and then reunited - by circumstance, A Woman of Paris sets the stage for Murnau's Sunrise four years later; it is not, as Chaplin must have realised, a simple matter of a small man kicking a bigger man up the arse before running away. Instead, we get a different form of movie art: the delicacies of framing, lighting and mood that would occasionally be apparent in its maker's later, better known vehicles, enhanced here by the extra time and perspective that follow from stepping back from the action and turning one's attention to the contributions of others. The movie remains largely setbound - where Murnau afforded himself greater scope to run wild and experiment with technique - but these particular sets facilitate as much finesse as they do control. They're impeccably dressed, for starters, bringing us close to the high life of 1923 - a milieu Chaplin would presumably have been familiar with - without obscuring the story's emotional stakes or our clear line of sight on our heroine's predicament. Who would you choose? The man who refers to you as his "little woman" and provides security, even luxury, but only the remotest access to his heart? Or the obvious equal, who can offer boundless love, but not a penny more? One further, site-specific complication for contemporary viewers to wrestle with: the fact Menjou, on his way to a long and celebrated career, is several times more charismatic than the naggingly flat and pallid Miller, left clutching to "penurious virtue" by way of characterisation. Yet even a century later, there must still be women, in many more cities than Paris, mulling over some version of the same quandary; the movie will endure so long as the wealth remains unredistributed.

The 2022 remaster of A Woman of Paris is now streaming via NOW TV.