Version made from a tinted and toned positive print, never projected and without intertitles, conserved by the National Film&TV Archive of London and from a tinted positive print with French intertitles, conserved by the C.N.C. – Les Archives du Film.
Up until this version only a black and white print without intertitles was known to exist that didn’t permit one to admire the amazing beauty of the original photography in what may be considered the masterpiece of Carmine Gallone’s early works.
“[…] But how he worked without hunger, without thirst, without sleeping, without resting, how carmine Gallone worked at his films! I have seen the greatest, the most dissatisfied and exacting artists: musicians, poets, novelists, painters, sculptors and playwrights, from Puccini, who created and recreated in an assiduous torment, to Bracco, who revised a dialogue a hundred times to make sure the commas were in the right place. But I have never seen anyone so sacrificed to obtaining perfection in his work as Carmine Gallone. For a close-up of Soava he studied and restudied the shot for an entire day, made use of the whole studio, turned on an infinite number of lights and made use of the improvised collaboration of the first friend that happened to pass by […]”.
(Lucio D’Ambra in Sette anni di cinema)
“In 1919 Carmine Gallone, in his early thirties, had already had occasion to experiment with rules and variations of the film star genre. He had directed Lyda Borelli in La Donna Nuda (1914), Marcia Nuziale (1915), Fior di Male (1915), La Falena (1916) and Malombra (1916); Diana Karenne in Redenzione (1915); Soava Gallone, his wife, in Avatar (1915) and Senza Colpa (1915). Maman Poupée is another diva film, but anomalous in that there is a partial reversal of roles. The femme fatale, an opulent and anachronistic Mina D’Orvella, remains a sketched figure relegated to the background; the real diva is the woman as mother, the family woman who is, just the same, able to create her elaborate seductive quality through games, masks and make-believe. Nevertheless, the turn of the star screw – towards comedy, towards realism, towards low melodramatic pathos – is not completed. There remains something to suggest that, in her joyous and maternal version, Susetta is a make-believe woman, a mechanical doll, that demonstrates being worthy of being the heroine only through discovering her own desires – up until the crime. …Working on the borderline between two identities, Maman Poupée achieves moments of fascinating beauty: at the mirror, Susette first notices her own shadow, which then fades into the face of the seductress.
To be especially noted: the refined use of unreal insertions (not so much real flash-backs as memories, reveries and suggestions through superimpositions and fades); the meticulous functioning of the décor, each one of which absorbs and amplifies the character of the heroine (late 19th century bourgeois for Susette, oriental- vampirish for Diana, her rival). One has the impression that Gallone sees the dominating star quality of Soava as trasparency (clear eyes, light clothing, light, soft hair) against the veiled quality (hair, bistre, eyelashes) of Mina D’Orvella.
(Paola Cristalli, Cinegrafie, n.7)