Critics reviews

It is a bold experiment in heightened cinematic naturalism whose only Hollywood contemporary are the proto-neorealist sound films of D.W. Griffith, like The Struggle from one year earlier. A blast of Eisensteinian dialectical montage fuels the film's opening, but once the setting shifts to Germany, the style switches to long, unbroken takes. Lubitsch moves from a cinema of speed and collision to one attuned to bodies and gesture.

One of his worst films," is how Scott Eyman describes Broken Lullaby in his biography of Ernst Lubitsch. The Siren recommends Eyman's book, but she doesn't agree about the haunting Broken Lullaby at all. It's far from Lubitsch's most incongruous movie; the Siren would give that honor to Loves of Pharaoh. But it's definitely an anomaly, with an opening that evokes nothing so much as All Quiet on the Western Front.

After the somber introduction and contextualisation (complete with stunning and very modern ‘mental image' interpolations) of this premise, many, many years before the current intellectual passion for ‘trauma studies', The Man I Killed turns into something that strikingly prefigures so many contemporary intimacy thrillers.