"The criticism was universally devastating, the audience stayed away, the producer is counting his losses, and I myself have to wait ten years for my next try in this genre. In other words, if I do one or two more pictures that result in an economic loss, the producer rightly feels that he doesn't dare to bet gold on my talents any more."


"His conception of the camera angle, cutting, montage, of the acting itself is, on the whole, that of the directors of the years between the wars. We are often reminded of Sternberg, sometimes of Vigo. Furthermore this archaism is here all the more evident—but all the less troublesome—in that it is conscious. In the beginning, done practically in silent-film technique, there is a short and strange dream sequence, before which even Buñuel pales. But this total isolation of Sweden both in time and in space has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. It is better to calmly go one's own way than, like so many small nations, to run oneself breathless after an ancient technique."


"The Naked Night is the most blackly ambivalent of Bergman's films—and surely one of the most brutally erotic movies ever made—but it is essentially a study of the masculine helplessness before the female force."


"The Naked Night [was] the first of Bergman's films that convinced me that he was not only a significant artist from a Swedish or Nordic point of view, but a renewer of the film's descriptive language....In sheer competence, Bergman has not advanced from The Naked Night. His film language has become more subtle. What he expresses in this picture he has learned to say in another way. At the same time, perhaps something of the spontaneous inspiration has been lost. The Naked Night belongs among the rare films that continue to grow, to live with the spectator."


"If Sawdust and Tinsel is influenced by any film, it is not Dupont's Variety. Variety is set similarly but stands thematically in exact opposition to Sawdust and Tinsel. In Variety, Jannings kills the lover. Here, Albert transcends his jealousy and humiliations because of an irresistable need to like people."


"Sawdust and Tinsel is relatively honest and shamelessly personal. Albert Johansson, the circus owner, loves both Anne and his chaotic life in the circus. And yet, he is strongly drawn toward the bourgeois security he had in life with his now-abandoned wife. To put it briefly: he is a walking chaos of conflicting emotions. The fact that Åke Grönberg played Albert, and that the part was expressly written for him, has nothing to do with any influence from Dupont's film Variety with Emil Jannings. It's much simpler than that: if a scrawny director aims for a self-portrait, of course he chooses a fat actor to play himself."