Through a Glass Darkly

I. 

[T]he picture opened for the New York public at the Liberty Theatre, with a top admission price of two dollars a seat [approximately $65 in 2025]. The motion picture had taken its place on a parity with the drama.

— Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights

II.

This film aspires to dream of a world that transcends hate. It is an abject failure, and the work of cinema that I respect the least. 

– Cormac Jones

III.

One crude but unquestionable indication of his greatness was his power to create permanent images. All through his work there are images which are as impossible to forget, once you have seen them

…

He was a great primitive poet, a man capable, as only great and primitive artists can be, of intuitively perceiving and perfecting the tremendous magical images that underlie the memory and imagination of entire peoples. All these… have a dreamlike absoluteness which, indeed, cradles and suffuses the whole film

...

All these images…have a sort of crude sublimity which nobody else in movies has managed to achieve

— James Agee