"Color in light, as the artifice that bonds fear and desire and as faces travel through passages of blue, red and green. Bava, who was also a wild cinematographer, plays madly with color interaction to tell a story of ghostly bondage. Color affects our senses and permeates our perception, to blend fantasy with reality and pleasure with pain. The screen drips with color. When the movie finished, I thought I would have colored scars on my body."

"Thanks to Criterion, I could finally see the Max Ophuls movies I’d been reading about for years. The story of Madame de . . . on paper doesn’t really interest me, but in the hands of Ophuls, Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and the great Vittorio De Sica (who’s not only a fantastic director and one of the fathers of neorealism, he’s also damn suave), it’s a movie that truly amazed me. I could watch those dancing scenes for hours."

"I came from a small town, with parents whose only wish for my future was a factory job, so this film, and the novel it was based on, felt close to home. My only desire was to somehow escape my surroundings, so when I first watched this movie in my early teens, I found the ending truly agonizing. Beautifully shot in black and white by Denys Coop, who also shot This Sporting Life for Lindsay Anderson that same year."