"Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, who has raised brooding introspection in films to a high art, reflects on good and evil in
The Devil's Wanton, which belatedly arrived yesterday at the Fifty-fifth Street Playhouse. His reflections are fittingly sombre and serious but strangely inconclusive. Mr. Bergman cannot be censured for his preoccupation with man's basic bafflement, but his approach to the subject, which has flashes of scintillating poetic allusions is merely a point of view that is heavily thoughtful but often verbose, disjointed and fuzzy....Mr. Bergman has one of his characters observe that it is impossible to search for answers to the problems of life since there is 'no way out.' In
The Devil's Wanton he has not found answers but he has come up with a few gray, arresting vistas showing that life can be real, earnest and pretty bleak."
— A.H. Weiler, The New York Times
"I felt a strong affinity with Bernanos' and Bresson's
Mouchette. It's a film I would have liked to have made myself, but which I didn't understand. In
Mouchette the motif is expressed clearly and explicitly, free from all impurities. The girl in
Mouchette and the girl in
The Devil's Wanton are sisters, sisters in two similar worlds. But while
The Devil's Wanton is full of quirks and divagation and coquetry and jumps about all over the place,
Mouchette is clear as daylight. It's a pure work of art. The religious motif only comes in for a moment, before the titles, as one sees the girl sitting there crying, and she says—'How will they manage without me?' How
are you to manage without the saint, without the person who bears your sufferings? Just for a moment—and then all the rest of the film is completely undogmatic."
— Ingmar Bergman
