Oh well, in 1921, I was 16, and I was determined to go into films, because I had read The Picturegoer about making films. It was the first number of The Picturegoer, a friend of mine at school had brought it into the house, so I started reading articles about actually shooting films, you know, making films. Something clicked and I said "This is for me", and from then on, I was completely dedicated. But then, I went on in a romantic way like you do at school, and then afterwards, when the family shoved me in a bank, saying "You're crazy to want to go in the film business, go in a bank first, and learn order." So, a friend of the family got me a job in a bank at Ringwood, a little market town in the New Forest. Meanwhile I was collecting everything I could find about films, but in a romantic sort of way, and I looked on films the way people did then, as a wonderful new plaything, but not serious. So then, by the time of A Woman of Paris, two or three years later, it must have been 1923 or 4, I knew quite a lot about films, but only in a very superficial way - the way the ordinary public thinks about them.
And then I saw that Chaplin had made a film in which he wasn't appearing, and had directed, called A Woman of Paris and it appeared at, I think at the Boscombe Hippodrome, or the Boscombe Cinema anyway, near Bournemouth, which was about ten miles away, so after the bank shut, I cycled in and went to see it, and I was absolutely knocked by it, because suddenly the whole medium grew up. Before my eyes. Nobody had ever really done any realistic films at all before, it was all make-believe, you know, and emotions were make-believe, as well as the people, and except for European films, which were mostly big romances, or something like the German Nibelungen, things like that, that was different: but in English-speaking, that is to say English-titled cinema, it was all completely fustian and make-believe, and playing, and all that sort of thing. Suddenly, here was a grown-up film, with people behaving as they do in life, and scenes treated with an enormous sophistication, like the sequence I always remembered all my life, the sequence where Menjou comes into the flat, and she's furious with him and with life and everything, and throws her pearl necklace out of the window, and he roars with laughter! You know, I was thrilled, to think that somebody could make a film in which she throws her necklace out of the window and he just roars with laughter! And she runs downstairs, and runs after the tramp who picks it up, and then runs away, and then goes back and gives him five dollars, and then comes back again, and I remembered so clearly her coming back in, and he's roaring with laughter on the sofa, and she just says "Idiot!". I remembered this one-word title. This has stayed with me the whole of my life - suddenly, to suddenly see such an intelligent, and yet innocent sophistication, because there were many things about the film which were really, in a way, innocent. But the film is a progenitor, obviously of Monsieur Verdoux, later on, but it's a much more grown-up film than Verdoux. But to think that this man who had all the power in the world, and who was this clown, really, could suddenly turn round and make a film that he wasn't in, with this lovely woman, Edna Purviance, and how good she was....... but this particular sequence, with the pearl necklace and with Menjou, the treatment of a man and a woman in a relationship like this, this sequence stayed with me always, ever since then- what was that in, 1923. I was eighteen. Eighteen years old.
Well, personally I didn't like it, but Frankie did...I would have liked something more sophisticated, more on the lines of La Ronde, I think it would have told the audience much more about the film, because his handling of the tragedy and the drama, is as I've said, it's sophisticated, it isn't heavy, it's light, and the music is romantic and heavy. But Frankie loved it, the music I mean.
I think the way to explain to the public A Woman of Paris is that it really was a romance, it was a romance of Chaplin with this marvellous woman Edna Purviance, who had been a foil in all his comedies and the usual sort of stooge, whenever anything was necessary in the way of pathos, she was always there; a marvellous woman who remained under contract with him for the rest of her life, showing how much he owed to her, and this was his gift to her, of a great starring role, in a realistic drama. Unfortunately for him, he chose a drama that was a bit too realistic, a bit too tragic, but I'm sure if we could get this thread across to the public, it would interest them enormously.
I didn't know it had been withdrawn. But you couldn't possibly be surprised, because Chaplin at that time was the biggest box-office name in the world. I mean the whole world. And the last thing the world expected from him is a realistic drama with his name on, which he isn't in.
