“The music of Au Bonheur des Dames is illustrating the passage from the silent area to the talkies. It already belongs to the thirties. Charleston, ragtime, “Chansonnettes Françaises” are flowing in one stream: the rythm of a constantly moving city: Paris! For this visualy sounded film, I chose to write a lively score sprinkled with an illustrative sense of irony”. (Gabriel Thibaudeau)

“Julien Duvivier is not a purist, he has never refrained from mixing different elements in a film. Au bonheur des dames begins with a series of magnificient shots of Dita Parlo arriving in Paris (her image superimposed onto the swarming crowd of people in the station), then in the Vieil Elbeuf neighborhood (a dolly shot follows her along the sidewalk, stops at an intersection, we pause to observe the rush of the big city with the face of the young lady from the countryside singled out by the camera). Up until the sequence in Isle-Adam, the film was shot in a studio. While the shop Le Vieil Elbeuf, the street that separates it from the large department store and the facade of the department store itself were constructed in a studio, the entirety of Au bonheur des dames was made in the Galeries Lafayette. […] Furiously angry over the death of his daughter and the pressure of the authorities, the old proprietor of the Vieil Elbeuf takes a pistol, crosses the street (in the studio) and goes into the large department store (in the Galeries Lafayette). Both of the visits to the store present documentary elements within the space of fiction: the presence of the customers and clerks. In the final scene everything hinges on speed, the tension; the editing breaks the animation of the shop into fragments like a series of shots taken directly from reality, and when the armed old man provokes a general riot on the stairs, fiction gives way to a succession of images – close-ups, long shots, high angles, low angles – cut and combined very effectively. […] During the party episode in Isle-Adam, an event in which employees and their bosses mingle only superficially, the dynamic editing of the sequence alternates long shots with close-ups of the different groups of ballerinas and divers. The photographic quality of the film resembles that of a documentary. The characters, the editing, and the search for significance in certain shots clearly shows the precision and efficiency of the talented director. (Hubert Niogret, in Aldo Tassone, Julien Duvivier, Il castoro, France Cinéma, Firenze, 1994)