Settling the score

Charlie Chaplin's film A Woman of Paris has a complicated musical past - now a new score, orchestrated by Timothy Brock, is available for its 100th anniversary, as Femke Colborne reports

- Femke Colborne

It was the roaring twenties when Charlie Chaplin's first serious drama, A Woman of Paris, had its premiere in Los Angeles. The women wore pearls and flapper dresses, the men crisp suits and Panama hats as they strolled along the bustling pavements of Hollywood in its golden age. Chaplin had a string of comedy triumphs behind him, including Easy Street (1917), The Immigrant (1917) and The Kid (1921), and the stage was set for his ambitious next project.

But things did not go quite to plan. Though it was a hit with the critics, A Woman of Paris left audiences in Los Angeles feeling somewhat bemused on its 1923 debut. They had expected another comedy, a film with Chaplin as the star, and instead they got a rather dark drama where he appears only in a cameo role. Chaplin had, to some extent, anticipated this response and arranged for flyers to be distributed at the premiere to warn the audience that this work diverged somewhat from his previous films. But he was still stung by the cool reception. Although the film eventually made a decent profit, it was not nearly as popular as his comedies.

Chaplin put the setback behind him and went on to make comedy greats such as City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940), but he never gave up on A Woman of Paris. In 1976, just a year before his death, he reissued an edited version of the film with a new musical score that turned out to be the last work he would ever complete.