"By emphasising Richard's enjoyment of causing pain director Lee flirts with a perversity more associated with fellow Universal employee James Whale. This is also explored in Mord, a character absent from history and Shakespeare and another of Karloff's grotesques... For one of Universal's lesser known movies from their Golden Age, it is intriguing that the studio should have decided to sidestep fantasy to show a very real evil. And because of this focus on human dictators and deranged power it is the closet the studio ever got to a kind of direct allegory. After all in the 1930s men like Richard were re-emerging on the other side of the Atlantic." - Tom Fallows, Classic-Horror.com