“Three episodes merge into one another almost without continuity. The three pieces result from the collation of some of the best tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, a writer who more than any other was able to describe the fascination of an era for the mysteries of vision and phantasmagoria. The star of the film is Hoffmann himself. Or rather twice Hoffmann. The mysterious themes which intertwine and superimpose themselves are many and derive from a rich literary (and cinematographical) tradition: marionettes, animated toys, magic mirrors, demons, men with no shadow or reflection. We are in the most fertile stage of the meeting between a melodramatic imagination of Romantic style and the love for the machines and devices which were developed during the age of Enlightenment. Neufeld manages to take account of all this with a magnificent and disconcerting film, where the theatrical device of scripting and screenplay are coupled with perfect fluidity to a range of surprising special effects. Where it maintains itself constantly balanced between the irony of the grotesque and the thrill of the perturbing. If the first and second episode are, from a cinéphile point of view, more attractive, it should be underlined how the third borders on genius, playing shamelessly and walking a tightrope between two elements, voice and music, which are forbidden”.

(Giacomo Manzoli)

“Max Neufeld was born in Guntensdorf on Febrary 3rd, 1887, studied acting and after having trod the boards of the Theater an der Josefstadt for a couple of years, as romantic juvenile, he signed a contract with Wiener Filmkunst in 1913, making his debut together with Polly Janish with a film entitled Treue Seelen . Back from the war, he played in Don Cäsar, Graf von Irun, […] In the role of a dare-devil swordman facing danger, betrayal and duels and even marrying an unknown woman in order to save his skin, Neufeld was sparkling. The movie was a huge hit both in Germany and abroad. The film made Neufeld the most popular young actor in Austria at the time: we find him again between 1919 and 1921 in two dozen movies, almost all love stories, of passion and death, in company with the curvaceous and sweet Liane Haid. With Lasset die kleinen zu mir kommen (1920), Neufeld directed himself for the first time. […] Between the end of the silent era and the Anschluss (1938), Neufeld was at home in Vienna, Prague, Budapest and Paris. When Österreich became Östmark, he moved to Italy and now his story can be read in many other accounts. […].

(Vittorio Martinelli, Cinegrafie, n. 9, 1996)