I cannot pretend to know what [Orpheus] all means, and I have a lurking suspicion that Cocteau doesn't know either, but I do know that it sent me out of the theatre quivering with excitement, and more provocatively engaged than I have been by any film for seasons. Cocteau, of course, has two prevailing ideas, that run like coloured thread through all his work: the idea of a poet as an extra-sensory medium, and the idea of a hungry marriage between life and death. He twists these two ideas together in Orpheus, as he did in a tentative way in L'Aigle a Deux Têtes, and has produced a picture that is bewildering, stimulating, sometimes touching and sometimes quite hateful, but always a provocation to the mind and eye. (pp. 185-86)

Since the author believes that all flights of high fantasy must be touched off from a firm...