A Woman of the World is a 1925 American silent comedy-drama film starring Pola Negri, directed by Mal St. Clair, produced by Famous Players–Lasky, and distributed by Paramount Pictures.

[1][2][3][4] As described in a review in a film magazine,[5] Countess Natatorini (Negri) leaves France seeking to forget a faithless lover by visiting her distant American cousin Sam Poore (Conklin) and his wife Lou (Ward) in their Midwestern home.

Richard Granger (Herbert), newly elected district attorney and crusading reformer, shocked when he sees her violating the town social norms he is enforcing by smoking a cigarette in public, finds that he is strongly attracted to her.

She avenges the insult with a horsewhip she gets from Lou, but when she draws blood from Richard she forgets all but her love, and we last see the pair in a hack on the way to the train station and the honeymoon, and he offers her the cigarettes he once denounced so strongly.

In keeping with the genre they are thin of plot and appealed to contemporary sensibility which was dazzled by richly lavish sets, costumes, and ‘decadent’ behavior…”—Film Historian Ruth Anne Dwyer in Malcolm St. Clair: His Films, 1915-1948 (1996)[8] A Woman of the World is typical of St. Clair’s treatment of romantic themes in which “the plot hinges on the fact that there are fundamental differences” distinguishing Europeans vs. Americans “in the way they approach love and life.”[9] Most of the humor of this “sophisticated comedy” derives from the collision between European upper-class cosmopolitan culture and American midwestern provincialism and its challenge to the latter's social and gender norms.