A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate

Chaplin, United Artists, 1923. He directed and stayed almost off screen (a porter, a few seconds). Edna Purviance is Marie St Clair, who misses a train for Paris and becomes the companion of Pierre Revel (Adolphe Menjou); a hometown artist reappears. Chaplin told players to underplay, and Menjou's cigarette business became the model for a kind of drawing-room film Hollywood had not quite made. Released as A Drama of Fate, it failed as a Chaplin picture because he is not in it, and it succeeded as a lesson other directors copied.