Based on some code from this article, here's how to extract the "Title" property from a Word document in python.

  import win32com.client
  app = win32com.client.Dispatch('Word.Application')
  doc = app.Documents.Add(self.filename)
  self.title = doc.BuiltinDocumentProperties("Title")
  doc.Close(0)
  app.Quit()

Hmm. There has got to be a faster way of getting that info. I'm pretty sure that Explorer isn't launching Word every time it wants to display the properties for a document.

There is: FPropSet. This is about two magnitudes of order faster than the previous solution.

    fps = win32com.client.Dispatch('FilePropertySet.FilePropertySet')
    fps.Pathname = file
    print fps.BuiltInFileProperties().Item("Title")

After spending an hour trying to figure out what misunderstanding of COM was causing my problem, I realized that the file I was trying to test against DID NOT EXIST (typo). I was calling everything correctly, but the information I was sending was wrong... note that setting fps.Pathname to a non-existent file will cause an exception.