The Masters  
The Powell & Pressburger Pages

Dedicated to the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and all the other people, both actors and technicians who helped them make those wonderful films.

A lot of the documents have been sent to me or have come from other web sites. The name of the web site is given where known. If I have unintentionally included an image or document that is copyrighted or that I shouldn't have done then please email me and I'll remove it.

I make no money from this site, it's purely for the love of the films.

[Any comments are by me (Steve Crook) and other members of the email list]

  Steve's Logo


Michael Powell Interview
A Woman of Paris
Interview with Kevin Brownlow

edited by Mark Fuller


In 1977, the man by then known as Sir Charles Chaplin re-released, for the first time since 1923, his romantic drama A Woman of Paris, with a new musical score by the then-ailing comedy giant. After a London screening, film historian, author and film-maker Kevin Brownlow interviewed Michael Powell, about Chaplin, A Woman of Paris, and their influence on him as a young film enthusiast, in Hampshire in 1923. The interview was for an article intended for Time Out, but was never used. Our thanks to Kevin Brownlow for passing on the tape of the interview. It has, of course, been edited; a verbatim transcript is available from Mark Fuller.

Kevin Brownlow
You remembered A Woman of Paris clearly?

Michael Powell
Oh, clearly, I told them that before we saw the film again, I can tell you exactly what I remembered, you know..

KB
I heard second-hand about the effect that the film had on you to begin with.

MP
  
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.

KB
The last shot...

MP
Oh, I always remembered the last shot, too, yes, when she's in the country, and she jumps on the back of the old cart, and she's going along, and he's coming with the car, and you think they're inevitably going to meet before she jumps off of it, and the car gets nearer with Menjou, and you think it's all going to start all over again, and then the car just goes by in a cloud of dust and she goes jogging along, and there's this beautiful, wonderful let-down.

But it's the actual approach to realism which still the cinema doesn't know very much about. Real realism. It was that that staggered me. Now I was a very intelligent little boy, and sophisticated from the point of view of reading, and hoped one day to be a writer, I read everything at that age, but still I was only eighteen and the cinema did seem to me - had seemed to me up 'til then - something quite different. Suddenly, it grew up and I grew up. And it's directly responsible for my own rather over-serious attitude to making films.

KB
How do you mean, over-serious?

MP
Well, I've always been a very serious-minded person, but people don't know it, really, they're always puzzled by my films, that there's usually something going on in the film besides what you're looking at, which is of course, the contact with the director, an audience has a contact with the story on the screen and also with the director who is telling the story. This is why a director in making a film is such a strange thing - there are some directors who are just card indexes, machines, just put the thing very well on the screen and that's it. But there are others, who are holding an unspoken communication with the audience all the time, and I'm one of those, and the audience is saying "Well, there's something going on" - I've had this said to me - "There's things going on in your films, particularly in this sequence, which I didn't understand but it fascinated me" and I didn't say anything - what it is, is the direct contact with the audience with the director.

KB
Did you understand at that age the relationship between Menjou and Edna?

MP
Understood she was his mistress, you mean? Oh yes. And then, of course, this wonderful masseuse scene, which was another thing I always remembered all my life, this wonderful treatment of the silly girlfriend, who sits talking and gossipping and talking about other women, while Edna Purviance is being massaged, and this wonderful masseuse - I remember the publicity story, which I read at the time, which said she wasn't really an actress, she was a real masseuse; she had this wonderful hatchet-face, a deadpan face, hadn't she, and directed beautifully by Chaplin. Whatever the girl was saying, you just get... (laughs) They really did stay with me all my life; but it was a turning point for me, in the whole medium. There are many films made today that are not nearly as grown-up as that one. And of course, it was so, so impressive it being made by Charlie Chaplin. Who wasn't even Charles then.
[Note: The masseuse in question was not a real masseuse at all, but Chaplin's secretary, Nelly Bly Baker.]

KB
But it didn't work with the audiences, did it? I mean it didn't make money...to any great degree...

MP
I don't know, well, I don't think so...it wasn't only that he wanted to make a sophisticated film as a director, was it? It was also in a way, repaying his debt to Edna Purviance..., to this wonderful woman, who had been all through these pictures with him, the slapsticks, as well as The Kid, he loved her and admired her, and as you know, she was on his payroll 'til her dying day, which is so moving I think.

KB
Incidentally, so was Georgia Hale kept on the payroll.

MP
Was she?

KB
And [Chaplin's early cameraman, Rollie] Totheroh, kept on the payroll..

MP
Isn't that marvellous.. but of course that's particularly interesting in A Woman of Paris because he gave her, really, every opportunity...but you know, the very sophistication of the film defeated his purpose - because he wanted her to become a big dramatic sensation, and go on to make her own career, I don't think to get rid of her, I think on the contrary, to thank her for all that she had done. But his own sophistication turned on a story like this, his own wonderful theatrical sense, it wasn't the kind of theatre that the audience of that time in films understood.

KB
And yet the style was picked up by all those other directors.

MP
Yes, like Monta Bell, and Lubitsch of course, The Marriage Circle..

KB
Which were successful, this is what puzzles me..

MP
Well, they were basically comedies, weren't they...What was the one with Monta Bell, Broadway, Walking Down Broadway?

KB
Monta Bell.....King on Main Street, he did Broadway After Dark

MP
Broadway After Dark, that was the one I was thinking of, yes. Remember the wonderful comedy that followed it, with Menjou, he calls with Monta Blue's straw hat in his briefcase, and they have a long talk, they're liking each other very much, and he goes on laughing and opens the briefcase, and then at the last moment, when they're both roaring with laughter, he takes out the straw hat and claps it on his head. Which he had left at his wife's flat, you see.

KB
Lubitsch repeated that with a cane in So This Is Paris, in which the cane goes from one side of the road to another.

MP
That's right, yes. Well, Chaplin's picture is a tragedy, isn't it?

KB
Well, I have yet to see the thing properly, I have only seen the most invisible Russian Archive print.

MP
It wasn't a sophisticated comedy, it was directed with great intelligence and sophistication, but basically it was a tragic story of the young man who follows the will o'the wisp of this girl and then kills himself. It's a little De Maupassant story, really, beautifully worked out. The script is impeccable, and the direction is impeccable, and would be impeccable today.

KB
It's funny, he didn't write scripts for his other films, he must have written one for that, though, mustn't he?

MP
Oh yes, very carefully, very carefully scripted.

KB
What were your first reactions, when you sat down in the theatre the other day, and saw it again after fifty-something years?

MP
First reactions, you mean as the picture unwound? What I didn't expect was this, sort of feeling of a deliberate control, from the very opening shot. He opens with a long shot of a little village in France, and dissolves into a medium shot, and dissolves into a close shot of a window, and in the window is this girl looking out. You then see her from in the room, outside. The boy who loves her comes, and she's locked in by her father, and so she escapes out of the window with the boy, and they go for a walk, and when she comes back, she's locked out. It was the very deliberate and completely authoritative way that he set up the film, set up the story, that he didn't hurry at all, that he didn't try out a lot of useless atmosphere, he just told the story very well, very clearly, and very simply.

KB
His direction has been, really, relegated to the pile 'Old Fashioned Rubbish' recently, I mean they feel that Chaplin was not a good director, which I feel is extremely shortsighted.

MP
Nonsense, yes

KB
It's a classical approach, but it works, and if it works, it's good direction.

MP
Yes, that's right, well, this film works in that way, there isn't one shot there that isn't needed, not one shot that isn't well done, and I think that's the thing that characterises it, which I didn't remember beforehand, I remembered details like this whole sequence with Menjou, because it startled me so much to see, treated on this very unsophisticated silver screen, in those days, you know, to see people behaving as they actually might behave in real life.

KB
Why do you think that Chaplin overall, taking all his work, has been downgraded since those days..

MP
I don't know why, very strange isn't it, .... it isn't just, after all, his performance at the end of City Lights which makes it so unbearably moving, when she realises that HE is the man...it's the most wonderful piece of intelligent direction and acting, isn't it.

KB
With a girl who had never acted before, and was not to act again..

MP
Had she not? That was Virginia Cherrill, yes. But his acting in it - incredible! Also, I think his directing of high comedy and everything in The Gold Rush was a brilliant, brilliant piece of directing, you can't say that's just a performance of Chaplin. No, I think what's exciting is to see the film now, and to realise that if people had understood it a bit better, maybe the screen would have grown up a bit quicker. No, you can't say things like that, really, you're perfectly right that it had an enormous influence on his contemporaries, and did change things radically, and for the better. Still, I think that the reason why his film perhaps wasn't a great success at that time was not because of the direction, but because of the story, it's a tragedy, people rarely take tragedy, really, they go to see someone tear off a strip, don't they. In this case, its very intelligence and quietness, and the way the tragedy was handled - because it's very good - I remembered it very well, the sequence in the restaurant, with the boy in the lobby, and the way Chaplin stages the suicide, you see him fall into the fountain, I remembered all this very well. I could have described quite a number of sequences before I saw the film again, that I had carried with me ever since then.

KB
You only saw it once?

MP
Only saw it once, yes. At Boscombe. But I'm sure you've done the same, Kevin, with some films, some films have had such an imprint - I really could almost have done, shot-by-shot, the Menjou sequence; where he comes in, he goes into the bedroom, he opens the drawer, he takes out a clean handkerchief, throws away the old one, puts the clean handkerchief in his pocket, comes in and reads the paper. And she's waiting to pick a quarrel with him. The whole sequence.

KB
What did you think of the music on A Woman of Paris?

MP
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.


Back to index