He returned to America determined to put it on-screen.
Chaplin also wanted to give Edna a great role...
...one that would help her build a career independent of him.
When A Woman of Paris came out, it had the biggest critical reception...
...practically of any silent film. The critics said it was absolutely great.
The audience just stayed away.
It was Chaplin's first failure, and this was because he wasn't in it.
It was a terrible miscalculation to have a Chaplin film without Chaplin.
I think there are probably two reasons for this.
One was certainly that he was determined to try to help Edna...
...to give her a new career as a dramatic actress.
And, obviously, she was going to look much better if he held back...
...and was not there to...
If Charlie Chaplin was in the film, nobody would see anybody but Charlie Chaplin.
I think it was also just he wanted to try himself, to see if he could...
...make a dramatic film and not be a part of it in performance.
He does this tiny little piece. He's unbilled...
...and he's a porter. He carries a trunk.
There are actually reviews from the time where people hadn't known...
...it was Chaplin, but they picked out this little comic moment.
Probably the film would have done immensely better...
...if Chaplin had taken his name off it.
You do feel it when certain aspects are just rejected and say:
"You are only meant to do this sort of thing. That's it."
"We'll only see your film if you're in it.
We don't care how beautifully you composed the frame.
We don't care about the sumptuousness of the decor."
It's detail, and then to go from that detail out.
And that is what you see in A Woman of Paris is the detail. And they always say:
"It's in the details." That's a cliche, but it's true.
The kitchen scene at the beginning has to do with the smell of the game.
Why is this elaborate thing going on?
But you get a sense of how the people lived because of that.
Look at her bedroom, alone, or the party scenes or the woman being unraveled.
You know, it really is extraordinary. He cuts to the guy.
The cloth is being unraveled from the left of the frame to the right.
The sense of decadence, the sense of eroticism in the film is very strong.
It's purely modern. It really is modern.
It's advanced for its time. And the thing about it is, it doesn't have the words.
They didn't have the technology for the words.
But they're like really up there. They're behaving.
Look at the moment. I get chills when I think of it.
It's a beautiful scene when the painter comes in to the party.
Balloons are flying around, and girls are dancing.
And Adolphe Menjou invites him in, and his elegance, just his form...
Has him sit down, and he lights the cigarette for the artist.
Just watch that again in terms of acting. Now, that's everything, the subtlety.
Once you concentrate on a moment like that, it's quite something.
And it's very modern. It's very natural. It isn't overdone.
This is the film 's basic triangle;
Jean, the provincial painter who abandoned Marie...
...Pierre, the Paris decadent who is now keeping her.
Another scene in that film, which is fascinating, is when the artist...
...is telling his mother it was just a moment of weakness.
And she comes in, and she hears them say that.
It's a shot on her back, and you can see the reaction it has on her, her body.
She doesn't move. The camera doesn't cut to a tighter shot of her or anything.
But you feel all of that, and it holds for a very long time before she turns.
Another director would not have done it that way. There's no doubt.
And it's very powerful.
Then, of course, he's telling the story with pictures.
You have that moment in the picture...
...where the artist is standing under the lamppost.
Their love has been rekindled, but the painter is weak-willed...
...dominated by a disapproving mother.
And there's a slow fade-out on him, and you know what's going to begin.
It's going to take it now to a tragic turn.
He doesn't stop there, though. It's a slow fade-out on his face...
...and he's just left glowing a little bit. And then it cuts to a series of shots...
...that are irises. Edna in bed, that's an iris. The mother.
And you just know that now everything's in place...
...and we're ready to go because the final scene is coming.
There's a calmness about it that is terrifying...
...because you know it's going to go badly.
And it's all very objective.
Putting everybody in place until you have that great moment...
...where the mother takes the gun, and she's like...
...something out of mythology in this black veil...
...and the dress and the flowing in the wind.
Jean has killed himself. His mother wants to avenge him.
But discovering Marie weeping over him makes her relent.
First you think she's going to shoot her, and she doesn't.
There's no close-up, but it's very moving.
A Woman of Paris on a big screen must have been powerful, very powerful.
The film 's great concluding irony.
Pierre is untouched by the tragedy, perhaps unknowing of it.
She and Jean 's mother devote themselves to an orphanage.
She and Pierre pass one another unseeing.
Another of Chaplin 's open-road endings, but without the cheerful Tramp.
Since 1915, the public had been encouraged toward total adoration...
...of Chaplin 's image. You could see him in animated cartoons.
Or in the comic strips.
Or you could buy a Chaplin toy or game.
The Tramp was ubiquitous and inescapable.
Everywhere you turned, there he was;
The sweet, slightly befuddled little fellow.
It was the first great multimedia merchandising barrage.
Chaplin, in those days, loved his fame in quite an uncomplicated way.
Everyone who was anyone visited Chaplin at his studio...
...when they visited Los Angeles.
He was always on. The camera was always present.
If he loved playing the Tramp...
...he loved at least as much his role as a world-class celebrity.
Thomas Burke again, "He lives only in a role, and he is lost without it."
But he was also the great god Pan, a famous or notorious womanizer.
I think falling in love for Chaplin probably was a great, great moment.
There are moments in his films where he sees the girl, and he sort of swoons.
I think he did it in real life, which is wonderful and romantic...
...and attractive and pretty, except that he probably does it...
...three or four times a day, and that requires an endless supply.
In his Show People cameo for King Vidor, the joke is...
...the world's most famous man is unrecognized in real life.
The unimpressed girl is Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst's mistress...
...and one of Chaplin 's lovers as well.
She swooned. They all swooned.
Often to Chaplin 's ultimate sorrow.
He had met Lita Grey when she was 12.
She'd played an angel, of sorts, for him in The Kid.
She reappeared in his life, age 15, when he was casting The Gold Rush.
The Kid's dream sequence is uncannily symbolic.
She presented herself at the studio, and Chaplin made a screen test of her...
...and then she was hired as the leading lady in The Gold Rush.
Lita had hero-worship for Chaplin...
...and Chaplin had an interest in young women.
He liked to see the young girl awaken.
As Lita would say, "He had a fetish for virgins."
They married in November, 1924. She was pregnant with their first child...
...when Chaplin took his company on location to Truckee, California.
By then, he knew the pregnant Lita would have to be replaced.
Their baby was born in May, 1925.
Chaplin knew what he has to show the audience.
When he's making films in the environment which is known to us...
...from everyday life, you know, he doesn't need to show you much.
But then in The Gold Rush, you know, who ever traveled to Alaska...
...and the Klondike and saw all this and like that?
So he knew, "I have to show it."
In Truckee, Chaplin made the most spectacular sequence of his career.
It involved 600 extras.
Curiously, the man famous for his obsessive retakes...
...did the entire piece in a single day.
But Truckee was a brutal and uncontrollable location.