"Although both author Maugham and prestige director Ingram might resent the honor, The Magician is one of the few authentic silent examples of the 'mad doctor' genre of horror thrillers.... Ingram was a director who literally 'painted' with light, and his films really cannot be fully appreciated unless seen in original pristine prints, with all the subtleties of lighting and rich color tonings (ours is an MGM vault print, though black-and-white).... The Magician, like The Black Cat and Curse of the Demon, is suggested by the 'career' of the much-maligned if hardly admirable Aleister Crowley. In the twenties, horror films, Chaney vehicles excepted, had not yet become a genre unto themselves and...The Magician was criticized as 'tasteless,' 'horrible' and 'un-entertaining', despite its restraint. Ingram seems to have been deliberately vague in some of his writing in order to avoid if not overcome questionable elements in the original. After transporting the heroine, via hypnotic trance, to an actual or imagined bacchanal in Hades, the sorcerer tells her that she now cannot marry her fiancé. No back-up title explains why, but Paul Wegener can clearly be seen to mouth the word 'rape'... (Whether the rape was actual or mental, it seems not to have diminished his interest in her 'maiden heart's blood' for his experiment!) With its interweaving of 'Svengali' and mad doctor themes, The Magician is a fascinating if not wholly successful work. Its climactic reel with its laboratory experiment in a castle tower, and its wild juxtaposition of horror with bizarre humor (seems to) provide a strong blueprint for Universal's first two Frankenstein films." William K. Everson