This is not such a bad film, but how much did Chaplin really have to do with the direction? Much of the film looks like it was made by Monta Bell (credited as editor) who specialized in fallen women, grimy quarters, and mother-fixated men. Chaplin certainly wrote the thing, though: it keeps cueing us to identify with the Struggling Artist-- that is, with Chaplin, or Chaplin as he was a few years earlier. Menjou and Purviance and the supporting cast are so good in the early Paris scenes that the arrival of the artist is a nuisance. The conventional resolution after the triangle meet trashes the delicate ambiguity set up in these scenes; it turns out that the writer has just been stringing us along. But it's still worth seeing for these scenes.
Review of A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate
