In this print, the two endings are separated by an explanatory title which reads as follows: “The ending of this film was changed after Max Ophuls finished the picture.  The following is the director’s original ending.”  In other words, first comes the “happy” or “studio” ending, used in U.S. release prints, then the “sad” or “director’s” ending, designated for the film’s European release.

At first sight, The Exile is just a traditional cloak-and-dagger film where Fairbanks reveals his ambition to follow merrily in his father’s footsteps. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the Hollywood actor, who believed the roles assigned to him were too “static”, openly stated that he wanted to pay homage to the illustrious star of The Iron Mask, The Thief of Baghdad and other silent classics. (…) Critics, and surely audiences as well, simply saw the film as a “good-natured foray into a story of kings, a B movie with an artificial nature, magnified by the fact that many scenes which could have been shot in natural settings were shot in the studio”. Must we too see the same thing in this film? Doing so would mean diminishing the extraordinary allure that exudes from this small, unpretentious work. It finds few equals in its genre, even in the States (where the genre proliferates), if not in silent films with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., directed by greats such as Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh. For its freshness and dynamism, as well as the utterly pure and blissful imagination that the producer-star infused throughout the film, similarly to how his father would have done, The Exile is worthy of more than just an honorable mention.

Claude Beylie, Max Ophuls, Paris, Seghers, 1963