"The Devil's Eye, a minor, clever, somewhat symbolixed comedy by Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, is intended as a bawdy song of innocence and experience, a frisky marriage of heaven and hell....The machinery of Bergman's allegory clanks at every turn of the plot—it needs quite a few more squirts of midnight oil. But as always his actors are excellent, his camera work refined, his script concise and elegant written. As always his deep-revolving spirit dredges up great gloomy gems of wisdom that flash light from many facets into the heights and depths of life. Among them is one of the first water: 'Love shields one from—nothing.'"


"There is no question that here again the great director and moralist is confronting us with the puzzling instance of the paralysis of a man, rendered the more bewildering because that man [Don Juan] is the classic symbol of sex. What Mr. Bergman is proclaiming is neither clever nor clear, and this is where the shortcoming of the artist is woefully revealed....the communication of the idea is achieved pretty much in talk, with few of his usually most effective cinematic images. And the talk is heavy and elusive, particularly when it has to be read from difficult English subtitles that are the death of any possible verbal wit. Mr. Bergman has failed us this time and in doing so he has exposed what may be the shadowy contours of an Achilles heel. Though playing with an idea, he has fluffed it, whether from carelessness or confusion we cannot say. But either weakness is dangerous in an artist as exalted as he."


"Ingmar Bergman is as industrious as he is talented, and it's obvious that he likes to put his gifts to new and unexpected uses. I'm sure his reckless-seeming changeableness is intended to startle himself—in his middle forties, he is still engaged in what must be the blissful-painful task of ransacking his capacities, and, like any serious artist, he sometimes takes his own measure by miscalculation, discovering who he is by who he isn't. The hazard of such a procedure is, of course, that the results are impossible to predict; moreover, the bolder the experimenter, the likelier he is to acquire several sets of admirers, each set in disagreement with the rest, and each convinced that its view of the Master is the only authentic one. The latest act of self-exploration by Mr. Bergman to reach these shores is a picture called The Devil's Eye, and what you think of it will depend, I guess, on what you already think of Mr. Bergman. For myself, let me avow that I am a practicing Bergmanite, though with schismatic tendencies in respect to his costume dramas. Since The Devil's Eye is both in costume and out, my verdict on it is bound to be equivocal; I call it a curiosity, full of entertaining and occasionally instructive matters, but not apt to become canonical."


"The Devil's Eye is a curious mixture, fragments of it almost vintage Bergman, but on the whole showing every sign of having been hastily slapped together without much care. In a disarming programme note, Bergman writes of the film as 'my little game...My intention (if any) was to play, for the amusement of the beloved and feared audience,' and the point is somewhat laboriously stressed in the film itself by its division into three acts, with Gunnar Björnstrand, in the guise of an actor-lecturer, laconically introducing each act as a divertissement. The Bergman hero and heroine are gently parodied in the statuesquely melancholy posturings of Don Juan, the teasingly ambiguous innocence of Britt-Marie. And innocence itself—the all-powerful talisman of The Seventh Seal—takes a tumble: where Jof's innocence gave him complete protection against Evil, here the innocence of the pastor (played by the same actor, Nils Poppe), leads him to witness, and even approve, his own cuckolding. The trouble is that Bergman's attempts at self-parody (The Face, for example) come dangerously close to being indistinguishable from his more serious work; and his inability to resist being serious within the parody unbalances it all."


"Bergman's first earnest attempt to grapple with the question of theatricality in cinema. It retells the key incidents in the life of Don Juan, but its account of the seducer's shallow bravado and inner angst and his final despatch to hell is like Fellini's Casanova to the power of ten: a 'comedy' from which the laughs have all been drained. It's mounted as an overtly theatrical performance throughout: the episodes are introduced by Bergman veteran Björnstrand, who lectures the audience on what they're seeing and instructs them to view it as comedy. The episodes themselves are highly stylised, with (non-musical) hints of Don Giovanni foreshadowing Bergman's declared passion for Mozart opera. The dominant impression, though, as in so many early Bergman movies, is of a deep pessimism that is imposed rather than felt as necessary or productive."