Word: chaplinitis
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Directed and Written by Charles Chaplin...
...film made in 1923. It failed then, largely because its writer-director did not also star in it, there being no place in the movie for a sweet little tramp. Now A Woman of Paris can be seen for what it is: one of the loveliest expressions of Charles Chaplin's genius a sort of last gift from that troublesome man turned legend...
...film was made as a vehicle for Edna Purviance, the female lead in 35 early Chaplin comedies and, it seems, the first great love of his life. It beautifully suits her talent, for she makes the transformation from the naive country girl to the worldly courtesan (and back again) with ease. Better still, the woman she becomes has a way of flashing glimpses of the girl she once was that is very touching, mostly because it is so effortless and unselfconscious...
...course, what the movie tells us about Chaplin that interests us the most. One of the several good things about Richard Patterson's neatly made compilation-documentary, The Gentleman Tramp, is the way it juxtaposes scenes from Chaplin's pictures and autobiographical material. What one gathers from viewing the Patterson film and A Woman of Paris is that the two male figures in the latter represent two contradictory sides of Chaplin's nature, which he tried to gloss over. Purviance's first love is an artist, but rather a bourgeois one. His mother shares his garret...
More than two months after the theft of Charles Chaplin's remains from a grave in the Swiss village of Corsier-sur-Vevey, police last week recovered the body in a cornfield near Lake Geneva. The kidnapers, it turns out, were a Polish car mechanic and his Bulgarian accomplice. The motive? Money. The pair have been telephoning Chaplin's widow, Oona, for several weeks, demanding at first $600,000 in ransom. Police tapped the calls through it all, and finally closed in on one of the robbers in a Lausanne phone booth. The idea for the grisly theft...