[It is difficult if not impossible to assess Dreyer's] later films without knowing the earlier films. One might go further. All or nearly all of the later films are in one way or another symbolic, and we can even say that the key to them lies in the early work….

I divide the films, perhaps arbitrarily, into two main groups. In the first group I put his five earliest films: The President, Leaves From Satan's Book, The Parson's Widow, Love One Another, and Once Upon a Time. In the second group are most of the rest: Michael, The Master of the House, The Bride of Glomdale, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, and Ordet….

The compelling point in this division is that in the best of the films of the first group—and only in those—can we see Dreyer as a finished artist, a master serenely working in complete command of his medium. All the rest—and this applies to Joan as well—are at least technically weakened by some ultimate lack of creative stylistic quality….

Each of the later films (except Glomdale, which is the one really weak Dreyer film) is a film with less or with uncertain style, but it is a film of symbolism. The idea takes precedence, and perhaps malgré lui Dreyer found himself using less than perfect forms to express the idea he had in mind. Deliberately or by the hand of fate something was sacrificed to get the idea out. Perhaps it could not have been otherwise.

If we had only three early films—The President, Love One Another, and Once Upon a Time—just these three—I would gladly say that Dreyer was a great master. (p. 26)

I cannot think of more than two or three first films that compare with The President. Perhaps none quite equals it in maturity and finished style. Strike is more ebullient, Citizen Kane is more ambitious, but neither has the polish of The President. Pather Panchali comes closest possibly. But I still think Dreyer's film has the edge.

The story is not remarkable. It is essentially a typical nineteenth-century melodrama…. What matters is what Dreyer does with this material.

Here at a single stroke Dreyer creates a new filmic world like no other we have ever known. He owes much, obviously, to Griffith. There is the Griffith cutting, the Griffith imagery, the Griffith handling of people. But Griffith is only a beginning.

The most immediately apparent, most obvious quality that one sees at a first viewing is the amazing decor and the use Dreyer makes of it. (p. 27)

There are the bare wooden floors, gleaming like polished ivory. There is a simple kitchen scene of white walls, white steps, bare floors—it might come out of the work of a Sienese master. There is a Griffith-like scene of the couple on a small wooden bridge in a landscape. But the combination of the bright white boards of the bridge and the surrounding shrubbery give us again the haunting semi-abstract quality of all this Dreyer decor….

It has the effect of the torches in the religious procession in El Dorado, but if L'Herbier is more delicate, Dreyer is more overwhelming. The scene is close, at the least, to Lang's tremendous shot of the burning hall of the Huns in Kriemhild's Revenge.

I have the feeling in this film especially of something more than real, of something that never was on land or sea. It is not fantasy in the conventional sense. It is reality, but reality filtered through some strange glass that makes the simplest scene at once human and natural and yet unearthly….

Dreyer's next two films do not seem to me at all comparable to this…. [Satan's Book] seems inordinately heavy and stiff, though of course showing the same feeling for stylized decor. (p. 28)

The Parson's Widow presents other problems. Personally I do not find much in it. To me it is no more than a pleasant, minor Swedish film with little to mark it as Dreyer. (pp. 28-9)

The one important thing in the film is the theme itself, and I can best explain that when I come to the symbolic films. It is more or less the theme that dominates Dreyer's later films, but here still simply a dramatic theme, not a symbolic theme, and so of little importance in this elementary form….

With Love One Another we are back in the world of the master. It is very different from The President. It is on a broader scale, with politics, religion, and history all playing parts. It does not have the special decor of The President—it is on a much more realistic plane. But by the same token it leads us in another direction. It reminds us of Pabst, and then as we watch it suddenly seems to take us to the Russians. And still it is Dreyer. No one else could have made it. (p. 29)

Everything about [Once Upon a Time] is fantastic, incredible. The one thing it most certainly is not is a "simple fairy tale." It is at once a legend on the grand scale of The Nibelungen, a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek comedy in the Lubitsch manner …, and a story so close to the Griffith of Isn't Life Wonderful … that we feel Griffith must have seen the film. At one extreme there is a scene that has all of the stately epic beauty of the Italian Odyssey, at the other extreme there are shots that could come right out of The Virgin Spring. It is, even in its present small, dismantled form, a veritable history of film, and to anyone with a feeling for creative film it is an overpowering experience. (p. 31)

[The] film is to a point symbolic. First there is the high comedy of the rococo world, then the visual grandeur of the forest (and the sea if we count the serenade interlude), then the simplicity of the Middle Ages. We go backward in time to find a new life, a new world.

But at this rate we are on the verge of the later Dreyer, the Dreyer of the symbolic films, the Dreyer who is, in film after film, talking about a new life, as are, I believe, Bergman, Antonioni, and Resnais….

With Michael we come to the first of the symbolic films. And it seems essential to consider at the outset the main theme….

This theme I call the Death of the Master. It is in fact a retelling of the story of The Golden Bough: the story of the death of the god. The Master, like the god, grows old, impotent, and dies, to be succeeded by a new, young master who continues the life and work of the race. (p. 32)

[The Master of the House] is a curious, rather moving film that follows a theme dear to the hearts of nineteenth-century writers from Dickens on—the theme of the revoltingly harsh creature who in the end reforms and becomes a human being. Beautifully acted, beautifully photographed, beautifully salted with homely little touches of everyday life in a simple, middle-class apartment, it is delightful without being coy, warm without being suffocating. I do wonder, though, whether it is much of a film. (pp. 33-4)

[The Bride of Glomdale] has a few nice landscapes, but on the whole it is a weak film, presumably shot to order, a heavy-handed Romeo and Juliet sort of thing that is none the better for having some very obvious Griffith cutting injected into the Way Down East climax on the river….

To say that Vampyr is the most confusing of the Dreyer films would be an understatement. It might well be the most confusing of all films. (p. 34)

My own feelings toward it are mixed. I like it—perhaps I should say I am fascinated by it, which is not necessarily the same thing. But I do not feel it is really a major film. It is—as is not very commonly realized—made up of two parts. It has on the one hand a succession of magnificent visual passages in a style virtually unique. But then after these purple passages it turns to a style that is hardly more than commonplace.

And I do not feel that it is an ordinary instance of alternating high and low key work. The two elements are too different, the change from exciting visual imagery to rather routine imagery is too great.

In any event I do not feel that even the purple passages are wholly satisfactory. One may ask, I think, what has Dreyer done with them? They seem to me to be fine things in themselves, but not parts of a creative whole….

Still, who can resist the appeal of the great things that Dreyer has poured into it?… The film may come apart as a film, but in its ruins there are flashes of lightning.

As for symbolism it obviously follows the theme of the Master to a degree. (p. 35)

[Day of Wrath is] almost a new version of The Parson's Widow, albeit with great changes of detail and approach. It is somber not light, and much of the story is new, but still there is the basic situation of the old Master and the young couple, one of them married to the Master.

As a film its most interesting aspect is its use of the same brilliant style, involving bold lighting and (for the hard, precise Dreyer) a reovlutionary soft photography, which we also find in Vampyr. But here it is considerably toned down. On the other hand the film as a whole is unified, and so succeeds as a whole better than Vampyr….

[Ordet] is not an easy film. In some ways it can be criticized as a rather unsuccessful film. But I suppose that on the whole, with all its superficially literal quality and its very leisurely pace, it is the finest of Dreyer's symbolic films after Joan….

It is a fascinating film, one which sticks in the mind, from the haunting voice of Johannes to the innumerable little bits of daily life that flow about the main events. Slow perhaps, it is still definitely creative.

But above all is its symbolism…. Dreyer's film is far more than religious. Here is a sort of culmination of the thread of symbolic truth that Dreyer had been following ever since Michael, a generation earlier. Not that Dreyer is particularly clear about it. But he has said more here, and he seems to have reached more definite conclusions. (p. 36)

In style [Joan] is certainly impressive. Much more than any of the three preceding films it has a firm style, and a style that is indubitably Dreyer. Here Dreyer has gathered together the decor, the imagery, the cutting, the serene purity of his early masterpieces and has produced a splendid symphony that remains unequaled, unapproached. (pp. 37-8)

It seems clear that the symbolism of the film is at least distantly related to the main theme of the Master. It is the Passion story, and of course there is the death and the gain for the world. Dreyer might well be pardoned for stretching his theme to take in the old story of Joan of Arc.

Yet I wonder. Dreyer specifically emphasizes the passion of Joan—in virtually every shot of her, her eyes are filled with tears. She is a far cry from the Shavian heroine of St. Joan, much less the brilliant, headstrong girl I see as the historical Joan.

I cannot help feeling that this is a personal confession. After the debacle of Once Upon a Time, after the surely less than satisfactory Michael and The Master of the House, after the unfortunate Glomdale, it would not seem unfitting. It is not something to dwell on. But we can make our own impersonal comment. It would be irony of the purest hue if that film which was a cry from the depths against the world were blandly, eagerly accepted by that same world as a "great work of art." (p. 38)

Kirk Bond, "The World of Carl Dreyer," in Film Quarterly (copyright 1965 by The Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of the University of California Press), Vol. XIX, No. 1, Fall, 1965, pp. 26-38.