"In a circle, all points on the circumference are alike; indeed, circumference is only a point extended in time and space. And so in circular films, all roles are equal, all capable of being played by stars or of turning unknowns into icons. This great Max Ophuls survey of the passage of love and touch, so adroitly poised between irony and tenderness, is also a way of showing us how far time, change and movement are more vital to life than those alleged monuments, individuals. A dozen stars become a dozen scraps of insignificance. The normal narrow view of movie stories, always going forward towards destiny and resolution, is abandoned in favor of the more mocking designs of hazard, obliqueness and digression, a dance in which the dancers do not hear the beat but in which they revert helplessly to where they began, older and no wiser.
"La Ronde did help pioneer episode films with all-star casts--a curse in Europe for much of the '50s and '60s. But for Ophuls, this commercial novelty was less important than a dramatic form which is as pretty, as enclosing and yet as unending as a watch. The one still point is Anton Walbrook, the director in a cloak and a top hat, somewhere between a magician, God and a devil, sadness as a smile. La Ronde presents honesty and love as a model of the helpless pact between a neutral camera and the actors it must record. The film goes round and round. The convenience of 'ending' is its one lie." David Thomson