Wes D. Gehring is like an archeologist working on specific sites, carefully exhuming the layers of debris and gluing together discarded shards to make the objects whole. Lately he’s been digging deep into silent cinema, trying to assemble a fuller picture of the movies and how they were perceived by moviegoers.
The latest book by the Bell State University film professor is called Charlie Chaplin and a Woman of Paris: The Genesis of a Misunderstood Masterpiece. The subject is Chaplin’s film A Woman of Paris (1923), not a baggy pants comedy featuring the Little Tramp but a film compared to the sophisticated European-set romantic comedies of Ernst Lubitsch. Because it’s an anomaly in Chaplin’s filmography (he’s onscreen only for a cameo), A Woman of Paris has been underexamined and wrongly examined by film historians, Gehring asserts. With Misunderstood Masterpiece, he aims to set the record straight.
To make his case, Gehring searched out obscure sources, including film reviews from forgotten publications preserved on microfilm, the fragile ephemera of an earlier media epoch, and was aided in his quest by the digitalization of some archival material. His research demonstrates that A Woman of Paris was not a money loser, albeit not the box-office success of his usual comedies. Most reviews were favorable. He concludes that contrary to the assertions of other scholars, Chaplin’s “base adult audience had not deserted him.” Gehring’s book helps strengthen what had been a weak link in the chain of understanding for his remarkable career as an actor, director, screenwriter and—still a century on—one of the world’s most familiar faces.
