Bonjour mes amis. Aimez-vous les films de Charlie Chaplin ? Are you wearing your pearls? Supping on truffle soup? Tooting your toy saxophone? Bien, alors nous pouvons commencer.
I bring some excellent news from the Criterion Collection and from the realm of Chaplinland. Charlie Chaplin’s game-changing melodrama A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate (1923), starring his muse Edna Purviance, will be released on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection on 18 March in the US and 7 April in the UK. Some of you will have been waiting for this news for a long time.
And here she is, my copies arrived yesterday!
See how I match my manicure to Edna’s? If Chaplin can take great pains to get the details right, so can I.
If you don’t know A Woman of Paris, you are in for a treat. This is the first film Chaplin made in which he didn’t star. He has a small blink-and-miss-it role as a station porter, which he cut down after preview audiences laughed too much. The wonderful Edna Purviance is the star instead, alongside Adolphe Menjou. It is the story of a young woman, who by unhappy circumstance leaves home to go to Paris alone, and when she is there, falls into the lifestyle of a kept woman. When the sweetheart of her youth arrives in the big city, she has to decide between luxury and love and discover whether she is not too late to make that choice at all.
Chaplin advanced the medium with A Woman of Paris. It is a masterly film, developing a whole new kind of storytelling sophistication for silent cinema. And this is a beautiful, heartbreaking melodrama. It contains humour, but the gags do not dominate. The tone is impeccable. The movies as a whole, and Chaplin’s art in particular, would never be the same again. On the film’s release, the critics were in raptures, and the life of at least one teenage boy in England was never the same again. : “Suddenly, [the cinema] grew up and I grew up,” Michael Powell told Kevin Brownlow.
Here is the full list of extras for this release:
- New 4K digital restoration of the 1976 rerelease version, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack featuring a score composed by director Charlie Chaplin
- Alternate score from 2005 created by conductor Timothy Brock, based on music by Chaplin, presented in uncompressed stereo
- Introduction by Chaplin scholar David Robinson
- New video essay by Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance
- Chaplin Today: “A Woman of Paris,” featuring interviews with actor Liv Ullmann and filmmaker Michael Powell
- Archive Commentary: About “A Woman of Paris,” a documentary by Arnold Lozano, managing director of Roy Export S.A.S.
- Excerpts from an audio interview with Chaplin Studios cinematographer Roland Totheroh
- Deleted shots from the original 1923 film
- Archival footage
- Trailers
- PLUS: An essay by critic Pamela Hutchinson and notes by Brock on the 2005 score
- New cover by Thomas Pittides
You may have spotted my name among some very illustrious company there. I am honoured to say that I have written the accompanying essay for the release of this simply stunning film.
Pinch me, but we have been here before. In fact I am very lucky to have written Criterion notes for two of my favourite Chaplin films: this one and The Circus (1928): which is also available in both US and UK releases.
