[In "Gertrud"] Mr. Dreyer's theme—the suffering of a woman who finds that men do not devote themselves entirely to love, that they also concern themselves with their careers—can just as easily be seen as feminine egotism instead of male egotism. But this whole subject of Love as Life can hardly be taken seriously today. The script seems a pallid post-Ibsen revolt against the idea of woman as chattel or toy…. The spiritual hierarchy of the sexes in "Gertrud" seems as dated as the costumes.

But Mr. Dreyer takes this [Hjalmar] Soderberg play seriously—one index that he is out of touch. Worse, his technique is the least fluently cinematic of any work of his that I know.

Its slowness will not surprise those familiar with Dreyer. His tempos have always been deliberate. But here his camera movement and his editing defy the minimal drama in the...