“The 23-years old unexperienced filmmaker who made Haceldama in 1919, with a very small crew, where he himself carried out all the main tasks […] seems to know almost everything in this profession which until then he had experienced only at a distance […]. In any case Haceldama did not have anything left belonging to the theatricality which had imbued the early French cinema, ending with the First World War. What is really extraordinary in Haceldama is the parallel flowing of plots made through an editing moving from one story to the other, sometimes intermingling them, so that characters may meet again, with a flowing and extraordinary freedom, because devoid of any systematic method […]. The stylistic originality of Haceldama, more than its elaboration of a subject replete of conventions, is the proof that young Duvivier is already capable of offering spectators a rich and tense dramatic approach, an incisive and inventive editing, fostering a permanent attention on constatly surrounded characters. All qualities which, along a career that was to end forty-eight years later, Jean Duvuvier would never cease to develop, film after film, without ever claiming to be an author, but with the sincere passion for his profession […]. Duvivier is one of the rare French authors, with Jean Renoir and René Clair, who developed his career through the silent and sound periods with indisputable results; but in the silent era Duvivier made three times more films than Renoir (younger than him) and Clair who is somewhat the eldest brother (just by two years). Duvivier perfectly assimilated the difficult passage to sound, moving successfully along the different developmental stages in French cinema up to the Nouvelle Vague. With the latter’s emergence at the end of the fifties, his popularity came to an end, also due to the often negative reviews accompanying his films”.

Hubert Niogret