"The ne plus ultra of von Sternberg's art, a synthetic creation of unique and transcendent beauty. It hardly matters that the script reduces Pierre Louys' classic of sado-masochism - 'The Woman and the Puppet' - to the most trivial level. Never has any woman looked as ravishingly beautiful on the screen, or seductively sexual - and compared to Dietrich the men are the 'objects,' wooden characters: if it's sexist, it's sexist in a radically different manner than most Hollywood stereotypes, and worth seeing for eccentricity. Never has any director demonstrated such complete mastery of mise-en-scène: even the slow dissolves between scenes are inspired moments, dying images reflecting the evanescence of all things. A warning to those with no nostalgia for decadence, or no sense of humor: stay away." --"Treasures from the UCLA Film Archives"