Directed by Charlie Chaplin

Position on the list (at time of viewing): 668

This film has dual notoriety. First, it is one of Chaplin’s relatively few dramatic works, and second, it was a ‘lost film’ for decades before it was finally rediscovered. It was actually only lost because Chaplin himself hid it from the public. It was the first film he self-published under his United Artists label, so he had full creative control over it. The film was a horrible and embarrassing failure at the box office, so Chaplin hid it away in the vaults for about 50 years before it was finally rereleased in the 1970s. Most people think that this failure was due to Chaplin’s absence from the film. His Little Tramp persona had become such a big deal at this point that people were actively angry that he would have the audacity to make a movie in which he did not also star. It’s really too bad that the world missed out on the movie for so long, because it’s a pretty engaging film and an interestingly different direction for Chaplin.

The film started off as a way for Chaplin to pursue a couple of interests. He wanted to see what it would be like to work exclusively behind the camera, and he wanted to hand the spotlight over to his previous frequent collaborator, Edna Purviance. Neither pursuit really worked out. The movie was such a box office bomb that he almost never tried something like it again, and Purviance really never took off in the way they wanted her to. The plot of the movie is a standard but well-observed tragic drama of missed connections and misunderstandings. An aspiring young artist, Jean (Carl Miller), and his young girlfriend Marie St. Clair (Purviance) intend to elope to Paris, but things go badly wrong. They do end up in Paris, but separately, and the movie follows their movement into and out of each other’s orbits. It’s a story of lost innocence and the random cruelties of the universe. I like these elements of the film, but I felt that the plot was too fueled by coincidence. Obviously it’s alright if your inciting incident or a single major plot point is a coincidence, but almost everything in this movie is entirely happenstance. People happen to be in the right place at the wrong time in nearly every major scene in this movie. It really begins to stretch credibility.

The acting is of high quality for the time period and genre. Purviance (who was also in The Kid) acquits herself very well. She has to explore the greatest range in the movie by far, and manages to convey naïveté, sincerity, and jaded cynicism at different points throughout the movie. She probably has the most subtlety of anyone here (inasmuch as any 20s acting is subtle). Adolphe Menjou does a pretty good job as an incredibly banal villain, a wealthy high-society man with whom Purviance’s Marie St. Clair shacks up in the big city. Evidently women at the time were really impressed with how well the central female character was portrayed, and there were quite a few female members of the press or film industry who praised Chaplin highly for the emotional punch of the script and presentation. While I don’t think that quite all of that impact holds up to the modern viewer, it is undoubtedly a cut above a lot of the other films of the time.

Actually, the part of the film with the greatest lasting power is its ending, which I won’t spoil here of course. Even if the movie itself frustrates a little with its overly-convenient plot and repetitive cycle of joining and separating our central lovers, the ending packs a huge emotional punch. It manages to feel like an authentic ending from a character perspective, while also maintaining thematic consistency with the movie that came before. It’s hard to describe, but it feels more like a modern art film ending, where everything comes together for a cohesive and powerful emotional conclusion. It also serves as another coincidence in a film full of them, but this one feels powerful and important, as opposed to convenient for the plot. The imagery of it has stayed with me, even as much of the rest of the movie has faded from memory.

I don’t know that I would recommend more than a single viewing for this one, though. It’s unquestionably well-created. Chaplin has a great eye for movement and incidental detail, and it’s very much on display here. The acting is perfectly serviceable for the era, and it doesn’t really make any big mistakes. Nevertheless, I just don’t see returning to this one with any regularity. The ending is really powerful, but it’s not a power that’s maintained throughout the rest of the movie. Any fan of Chaplin owes it to themselves to see one of his rare dramatic pieces, and I would think even general fans of silent film would find something to appreciate here, but I’d still say you could see it once and pretty much be done with it.

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