Les Efants du Paradis, which opens the Rialto for a new season of French films, is the crown of the French cinema, and must be an abiding delight to … - C. A. Lejeune

A new film by Alfred Hitchcock is usually a keen enjoyment. Psycho turns out to be an exception. There follows one of the most disgusting murders in all screen history. It takes place in a bathroom and involves a great deal of swabbing of the tiles and flushings of the lavatory. It might be described with fairness as plug ugly.

Hitchcock gets jubilantly to work on this very raw stuff, expressing with clever conjunction of shots, with superimposition, double exposure, dissolves, the moving camera, and all his bag of technical tricks, the feelings of loneliness, bitterness, and nausea which his characters might be expected to enjoy; he even tries to give the thing symbolic weight by sending his hero to perdition down the moving staircase of a tube station and the descending shaft of a mansion flat lift. I have never seen such an interesting, production of rubbish nor a clever film which deserved quite so little praise.

Les Enfants du Paradis seems to me to stand head and shoulders above every other film of the year. I recommend it ... to anyone who relishes fine performance, exact dialogue, magnificent manipulation, and an honest, if fatalistic, groping towards a philosophy. He may not get the thing completely, but he will feel the bite of it.