I cannot pretend to know what [Orpheus] all means, and I have a lurking suspicion that Cocteau doesn't know either, but I do know that it sent me out of the theatre quivering with excitement, and more provocatively engaged than I have been by any film for seasons. Cocteau, of course, has two prevailing ideas, that run like coloured thread through all his work: the idea of a poet as an extra-sensory medium, and the idea of a hungry marriage between life and death. He twists these two ideas together in Orpheus, as he did in a tentative way in L'Aigle a Deux Têtes, and has produced a picture that is bewildering, stimulating, sometimes touching and sometimes quite hateful, but always a provocation to the mind and eye. (pp. 185-86)

Since the author believes that all flights of high fantasy must be touched off from a firm earthhold, his film, astonishing in its camera tricks and devices of pure cinema magic, is grounded here and there in moments of contemporary realism. The ferryman Charon becomes a smart chauffeur: the messengers of death are goggled motor-cyclists: code messages are tapped out by a secret radio: a trial in the shades is conducted along the lines of a war crimes tribunal.

All these things, plus the fact that it is hardly possible to act Death, Death's servants, or Death's victims,… make Orpheus a trifle confusing to the spectator. But it is an experience that is very well worth trying. I am not quite sure, in my own heart, whether the film is healthy: some tiny thing suggests to me that it is a work less inspired by wisdom than by the splendid, fleeting, unco-ordinated ideas that flash across one's mind in a moment of perilous exhilaration. Nevertheless, exhilaration is such a rare quality in the cinema that I cannot help but welcome it, and entreat that you will look at this thing openheartedly, with a mind and eye equally alert. (p. 186)