“Her delicately fragile yet free and easy grace, her sidling glance, the way a black lock of hair would fall from its firmament draping onto her cheek and she sidles it away, her shoulders undulating out a shrug, a shuddering gesture that has been imitated a thousand times. All of Berlin, as Kortner once said, had an affair with her, and her lovers were of both sexes. She gave life to – or better yet, she embodied it – the ideal of androgynous beauty that was universally desired after centuries of affectatious femininity.  (Hilde Spiel, Frankfurter Allegemeine Zietung, 13.5.1986, in Hans-Michael Bock (Hg.), Cinegraph. Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen Film, 1984, s.p.)

“Since Geiger von Florenz, Nju and Liebe, Elisabeth Bergner has been striving for her own film style. Yet her impact on screen lags far behind her great stage successes. Why? Elisabeth Bergner did not stand up to the camera, she walked, pranced around it, let it photograph her in the same poses, once, twice, a hundred times, and the film presented these images to the audience like a host.
There was only one way out of this paralysis: Bergner had to tolerate partners of standing at her side again. She had to abandon her star allure and get back to lucid acting. In this sense, Fräulein Else (Capitol) represents a pleasant turn for the better. It has an interpretative line, a development which is maintained to the end. Bergner does not evade the apparatus anymore, she acts. Though in a fragile, extremely sensitive manner. There is still a trace of understatement, a last remnant of fear of her role in this psychologically refined girlish figure, a hesitation, a reserve. But this very passivity imbues the figure with something strangely veiled and distant. The sixteen-year-old’s erotic crisis is anticipated in delicately implicit hints: the transition from her enthusiasm for sport to the neurotic anxiety dream, to hysteria, to suicide. A gradual slipping away, a darkening, a fading. Fräulein Else is Elisabeth Bergner’s first real acting achievement on screen”.
(Hans Sahl, Der neue Bergner-Film Fräulein Else. Der Montag Morgen, Berlin, Nr. 10, 11.3.1929, in Gero Gandert (Hg.), Der Film der Weimarer Republik, 1929, 1993)