[Clair's] films achieve a peculiarly happy combination of instinct and training that I have never quite seen paralleled in the cinema; you find it in his conversation too, and in his approach to a story, and in his attitude towards the accidents of life. He has an infectious, rather ingenuous sense of fun that leaps all the time to meet a comic conclusion already suggested by his practical experience of technique; he is at once spontaneous and considered, fantastic and yet curiously precise. The tradition of laughter which he has created for Europe is akin to, and yet distinct from, the laughter of American slapstick; it is based on an acceptance of the school of Sennett, but expressed in an individual and spirited personal idiom, a kind of passion for the camera's resources that leads him up the most varied and lovely avenues of discovery before he achieves...