The theme is very
much like that of something as outwardly different as Asquith’s Libel,
the main way of achieving it is by adopting Clément’s Jeux interdits for
the purpose, translating it, as it were.
The girl with a
case of amnesia and the mark of Cain on her brow has a shotgun aimed at her in the
first scene, the playful boy falls down and kills himself, wounding her with a painful
memory she curtails.
The gypsies on
the scrap heap come to her aid, one does, when the memory is forced up and she
leaps screaming into the river.
The war forgotten
and the victor’s guilt, the fanciful preoccupation with death among “children
and small animals”, the awakening of memory as a live connection.
The Monthly
Film Bulletin was apparently unaffected. “Behind the overwhelming feyness
of it all lurk assumptions which in cold blood look almost sinister.”
Variety took it for a “naïve yarn” saved by sincerity.
The direction is
especially remarkable for its close attention to the performers, and that
includes the several dogs. Mills and Ibbetson together have a way of eliciting
more of a face, in the round one should say, to tell the tale.