Version made from a tinted and toned positive copy with French and Flemmish intertitles conserved by the Cinémathèque Royale Belgique and from a tinted and toned positive copy conserved by the Cinemateca Brasileira in Sóo Paulo. The two copies were profoundly different, especially in the complete diversity of the intertitles. In the Brasilian version the story is told through the pages of a diary, whereas in the Belgian version the intertitles carry direct speech. Thus the rythm and perception of the story change completely even though the editing and the events are identical.
The restoration done by the Cineteca of Bologna has aimed at conserving and reconstructing where possible the diary narration.
“The story of a woman, or rather of a femme fatale: the story of how behind every vamp there might be hidden a sad story. Compared to a gallery of belles dames sans merci, Perego and Palermi’s film serves as an excusatio and reproduces a genealogy of immorality, serves as a justifying footnote for an entire catagory. What has brought the nameless woman to her cruel and indifferent fate? We find, in order: an Ursuline convent, a heartless mother, a grim and arrogant countess, a spoiled young man who abbandons her already in a state of pregnancy. There you have material enough. Palermi’s script transforms this linear tale into a complex web, resorting to the use of the diary (I don’t know if there were precedents of the type in Italian cinema history; certainly the exemplary nature of the melodrama is such that all of it, youth, seduction, death-bed confession and, above all, the writing, seems to function, at least formally, the same as in a later classic such as Lettera da una sconosciuta by Max Ophüls). As for the director, Eugenio Perego adds chiefly two things: a scenery that in the hospital scenes is spartan and abstract, flattened in a black and white that is so close to hallucination that we’d like to able to call it expressionist (while The Cheat, 1915 may not have been unknown to the bric-à-brac of Pavanelli’s house) and a lighting that isolates the white objects in a prevalent darkness – a vase of flowers, a long string of pearls, Pina Menichelli’s hand (beautiful shot) held out to beg for the denied pity. Star-like Excusatio non petita, but certainly enjoyed, so that Storia di una donna was one of the biggest successes of its time: Palermi himself did a remake in 1928 starring Enrica Fantis and entitled Le confessioni di una donna”.
(Paola Cristalli, Cinegrafie, n.7)