“Monsieur Beaucaire is a cruel film, a film lucidly devoted to the ridiculous (but a ridiculous much less funny than the parody which Gene Kelly was to make of it in Singing in the Rain). Valentino disappears behind the mask, behind the many masks of this intemperate courtesan of the Court of Louis XV. He is a duke of Chartres who pretends to be a barber, who as a barber pretends to be a noble, who is first uncovered in his false mask and then in his real one, and delivered at last to his original role: almost a vertigo of tricks and deceit, great comedy material made rigid by the tableaux of Sidney Olcott’s direction. Rambova concentrates her usual bent on the costumes, managing to invent art déco embroidery for 17th century tailcoats, but her first effort seems to make of Valentino a sort of sinister minstrel: powdered, with a white wig, moles, a heart-shaped mouth, resting on a lute of outrageous dimensions, shot against the light from behind the curtains of a small court stage, exposed (more than ever like a puppet) to the looks of a female public powdered and be-wigged like him. […] Despite the happy end, Monsieur Beaucaire remains the darkest, the most perverse of Valentino’s films.

Paola Cristalli, Rodolfo Valentino: lo schermo della passione, Ancona, Transeuropa, 1996