“Jean Grémillon is one of the greatest French film directors. With Renoir, René Clair, Marcel Carné and Jacques Feyder (who was his teacher), he has given the French school the first-rank position in the world which it has maintained for 50 years. And to speak only of his recent films, Lumière d’été and Le ciel est à vous, made during the Occupation, these were not only masterpieces but also authentic civil acts which honoured their maker and the entire French cinema. Le ciel est à vous came out in 1943. Already eight years ago now. During which time Jean Grémillon – full of admirable or grandiose projects – was unable to make neither Le massacre des innocents, a celebration of contemporary France, nor Le printemps de la liberté, a saga of 1848, but only Pattes-Blanches, which belongs to the world of its writer, Jean Anouilh, rather than to that of its director. French producers sometimes consider that a filmmaker or anyone else has sinned against the omnipotent divinity, Profit, and impose upon such sinners a penitence: to make a “commercial” subject, which allows no choice, no time for reflection and a very constrained budget (…) Thus the story [of L’étrange Madame X] belongs to the world of popular magazines like “Confidences” or “Petit Écho de la Mode” or the old boulevard theatre. It is not the real world. However conscientious the adaptation by Albert Valentin, and despite the skill of dialogue writer Pierre Laroche, the improbability of the story is often intolerable. Above all the sequence in which the husband, full of delicacy and implication, learns of his own marital misfortune from a well intentioned cabinet maker is rather awkward. It is clear that the conditions imposed on Jean Grémillon have prevented him from doing more to characterize the “great world” which remains conventional in treatment. I have known many publishers, who constitute a variegated and picturesque race. But I have never seen anyone comparable to the husband of L’étrange Madame X. Apart from these reserves about a subject which the director has not been able to modify fundamentally, one has still has to admire without reservations the masterful direction of Jean Gremillon, He is able – with the help of the great director of photography Louis Page – to capture in five images all the photogénie, all the poetry of a great Parisian stadium. He is able to transform the poverty of the setting of a street into authentic beauty, with the cries of the street vendors are heard in the background. Through the window with the sign of a bistro in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, (…) he creates, via furnishings and montage, a social contrast, an alternation which has its own value (…)”.

Georges Sadoul, “L’étrange Madame X”: l’excellent et le moins bon (frangais), in “L’Écran frangais”, n. 312, 27 June-3 July 1951