It is hard to think of anybody (with the evident exception of Jean Cocteau) who, however egotistical he might be, would have the nerve to make a full-length film about himself. But M. Cocteau has done it. He has made a film all about Jean Cocteau in his "Testament of Orpheus"….

That is to say, he has made a picture about his own spiritual-esthetic search through a surrealist world of phantoms and symbols for the favor of the goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athene….

[This] remarkable old show-off, who has done enough good things in his time to excuse a splurge of arrant narcissism in his declining years, has made a film that, for all its high pretension to being a symbolization of the poet's quest …, is really just a glorified home movie that should appeal mainly to the poet's admirers and friends.

Indeed, it is almost essential that one not only admire M. Cocteau but also be thoroughly familiar with his "Orpheus" … in order to get the least glimmer of what goes. For this "Testament of Orpheus" is in the nature of an explanation of (or possibly an excuse for) that previous film, constructed with so many references to it, as well as to various paintings and murals of the versatile artist, that one would be lost coming into it cold….

This is all the clarification of the picture you are going to get from this critical source. M. Cocteau is much too far-out for our figuring.

[The] total "testament" is so completely and complexly intellectualized that its meaning is totally clear, we'll warrant, only to M. Cocteau. Nor does the graphic content of the picture so stimulate and fascinate the mind that it generates an emotional reaction….