Le Lion de Mogols is from the end of 1924, is a key year in film history. It is the year of Greed, and the beginning of a revolt against the technical research of the French and German avant-garde. It is the position taken by a generation of youth fed on American cinema, that shrug their shoulders at the sight of Caligari because they believes in Nosferatu. These youth had had enough of the avant-garde of L’Inhumaine. They express themselves clearly by applauding Entr’acte and Clarence Brown. For these youth La Belle Nivernaise was an alliance agreement broken by Epstein. On their part, none of the advocates of expressionist and impressionist research hid their disappointment. They expected something to follow Cœur fidèle and perhaps even Le Brasier ardent. Instead they offered Ivan Mosjoukine in golden tights and a story in the style of Maurice Dekobra. Everything sounds false, beginning and end. Everything is fake: the movement of the characters, their town, the scenes which recall Russian ballet; everything is soaked in bourgeois conformism and blissful, fatuous ingenuity. The indignation of someone like Mitry was quite understandable. And yet they were all wrong. They were wrong because Epstein was looking for something, and he didn’t care much what Mosjoukine wanted, because to him Le lion des Mogols was just a pretext that would allow him to uncover what he was looking for. […] The only reproach we can make today of Le Lion des Mogols is that it is not completely fantastic. It is not completely soaked, from the first image to the last, in that surreal realism that Epstein imbued into the Jockey scenes, from the taxi ride, to the lights of Paris, to the masquerade ball, without ever stepping away from reality.

Henri Langlois, in Cahiers du cinéma, n. 24, 1953