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Passion and DesireFilm 5 of 20
A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
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Chaplin, United Artists, 1923. He directed and stayed almost off screen (a porter, a few seconds). Edna Purviance is Marie St Clair, who misses a train for Paris and becomes the companion of Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou); a hometown artist reappears. Chaplin told players to underplay, and Menjou's cigarette business became the model for a kind of drawing-room film Hollywood had not quite made. Released as A Drama of Fate, it failed as a Chaplin picture because he is not in it, and it succeeded as a lesson other directors copied.
In two programmes
Wanting played cool. Chaplin stays off screen and tells Menjou to underplay, and a kept woman chooses between a rich man's rooms and a poor man's studio without a lecture. Menjou's cigarette business is the school Lubitsch went to. Watch who pays: the artist, and his mother.
Almost no Chaplin in it: a porter, a few seconds. Menjou underplays on instruction, and Lubitsch took notes. It failed because the Tramp was not in it and taught the drawing-room film how to behave. The last shot is a road with two people on it who do not see each other.
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