Jannings is incomparably the greatest of all screen actors, unless it be that the aforesaid Charles Spencer Chaplin can tie him.

| Dec 14, 2021

Mr. Jannings is as good as he was in The Last Laugh and Variety, if not better; the picture itself, while not quite up to the high level of these two outstanding instances, is creditable and admirable.

| Oct 5, 2021

Great care has been shown in the backgrounds for this photodrama and meticulous attention to detail has been exercised.

| Jul 14, 2021

Are the early and middle portions of the picture good enough to outweigh the atrocious third section in which every known tear-inducer but the homely onion is tossed at the audience? Thinking it over calmly, we are inclined to answer in the affirmative.

| Jul 14, 2021

The producers have been so much afraid of launching the European Jannings without sufficient ballast of American hokum... that they have wasted much first-rate ability on what is essentially a maudlin film.

| Jul 14, 2021

Even the artificialities of Hollywood have not yet touched the fine acting of Jannings, as is proved by his excellent character work in The Way of All Flesh.

| May 21, 2021

It is a wonderful story, wonderfully portrayed, and provides a worthy medium for the genius of Emil Jannings.

| May 21, 2021

The Way of All Flesh might be your story or mine. Its setting might be our homes, and our families might be its characters. It is the unsuspected drama that walks past us on the street and the mute tragedy one reads in the eyes of old men.

| May 20, 2021

The Way of All Flesh is a saga of sacrifice, the coming of temptation in the life of a simple, home-loving man -- a powerful lesson on the frailty of mankind.

| May 20, 2021

The Way of All Flesh, poignant, powerful melodrama... proves only what we already know -- that Jannings is the greatest of all character actors among us.

| May 20, 2021

[Jannings] has the Chaplin humor and far more than the Chaplin pathos... He is a better villain than Wallace Beery. He rivals Chaney In the art of makeup. He is a composite of all the great, and himself the greatest of all.

| May 20, 2021

This film matters, because it foreruns a new, serious, and honourable kind of popular tragedy, using popular emotion, not exploiting it. Dignity has come into the American commercial film, and Vic Fleming deserves some credit for it.

| May 20, 2021

A production which gives Jannings the chance to do the most sincere, the most touching acting that we have seen for many a day.

| May 20, 2021

Jannings acting intensifies, it does not transfigure.... He can impress himself on the general atmosphere, but he cannot express that atmosphere. Put him in water, and he will swim; put him in mud and he sinks, he becomes mud.

| May 20, 2021

It is not a brilliant picture, but it is a good one. Victor Fleming, the director, has wisely eschewed all efforts at copying the methods of those German films which first brought Jannings into prominence.

| May 20, 2021

Victor Fleming must have a marvelous intuition for what Jannings can accomplish to have kept his performance so perfectly in tune at every moment.

| May 20, 2021

The faults of [the film] are that the story is none too firm, and it doesn't quite know where to end. But the first two-thirds of it, a solo performance and atmospheric setting are on as high a plane as the American motion picture has yet reached.

| May 20, 2021

A motion picture which is, in this captious critic's estimation, easily the best film offering of the year and quite one of the best movies of all time.

| May 20, 2021

It is a story few who see it will ever forget. It is a picturization that reaches a plane of pantomimic art seldom reached by even the most accomplished of the screen celebrities.

| May 20, 2021

I herewith make record that this picture contains the best acting I have seen in more years than I like to enumerate.

| May 20, 2021