Critics reviews

For his last film with Marlene Dietrich, Sternberg—working as his own cinematographer—streaked and slashed the screen with shadows and highlights, clotted it with lace and foliage, to match the serpentine extravagance of his wily heroine's schemes... Despite his evident sympathies for the daring freethinker Antonio, von Sternberg finds a lurid erotic charge in the cruelty and the constraints of church-bound despotism and a heightened thrill in a femme fatale who may prove truly fatal.

It might not be among the worst films of its era, but it lies near the bottom of the director's oeuvre. It has fleeting moments of reserved brilliance, but rather than flowing effortlessly into the hearts and minds of an audience, it seems labored and callous.