A Woman Of Paris
With A Woman Of Paris, Charles Chaplin tried his hand at serious drama, and, as Herman G. Weinberg points out, when it was released in 1923 (a few years before the similarly sophisticated sexual satires of Ernst Lubitsch, who acknowledges his debt to Chaplin with The Marriage Circle (see October 21)), “its effect was electric: an important segment of film direction from that day onward was no longer the same. Soon it was being bruited about the film capitals of Europe that the American cinema, with two films, Foolish Wives and A Woman Of Paris, had come of age. Certainly these were the most sophisticated motion pictures made up to that time.” The film positively sparkles, with memorable performances by Edna Purviance and Adolphe Menjou. Out of distribution for some 50 years, A Woman Of Paris was declared by Andrew Sarris on its “debut” at the Museum of Modern Art, “the best film of 1976.”