The Maid of Orleans has come singularly and movingly to life in Carl Th. Dreyer's film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. (p. 373)

The legends and fancies built about Joan in the last five centuries are so many and diversely colored, so blighted by fanaticism or fervor or chilling "analysis", that most of them have led either too tricky or too mystic a path back to that gray day of the murder at Rouen. To its vast credit, the scenario wrought by Mr. Dreyer and Joseph Delteil does nothing of the sort. Instead, with the absorbing directness of a piece of excellent trial reporting, it has hurdled the boundaries and by-the-way distractions of some centuries of legend, has gone back to understand what happened to Joan, and why. And such are its qualities, as suddenly refreshing and clarifying as those of good painting, that from it she now...