"Joe May's German period is best known for its serial-like melodramas and thrillers, while he personally is perhaps best known as the man who helped launch Fritz Lang's career. In Hollywood from the early thirties on, May's directorial career was not prolific but was certainly interesting (Confession, The Invisible Man Returns, etc.). Homecoming is perhaps his least typical production, and certainly (also untypically) more concerned with art than the box office, but this may be largely due to the omnipresence of Erich Pommer as producer. Though a stylized and slow-moving production, it reaches some surprising emotional peaks due in no small measure to both the subtlety and intensity of the acting. Even though her role is perhaps the least demanding of the three leads, Dita Parlo as always brings both beauty and poignancy to a part that was probably quite one-dimensional in the writing. The possibly excessive studio-bound stylization of the early part of the film is doubtlessly intentional, so that the prisoner's ultimate release and return to the normalcy of his home can be stressed by the virtually documentary footage of Hamburg and its environs as realism is introduced." William K. Everson