The original title of Divided Loyalties was Industrial Keys. The young Orpheus is awakened rudely to a world in which industry holds all the keys, and even personal life has a manufactured, industrial quality, as Adorno would say. Warren Sonbert's films have always had a trace of sociological inquiry, and in Divided Loyalties one can almost make out the beginnings of a critique of modern society: from the furs and tuxedo set at the opening of San Francisco's opera season, to the mangy train tracks of the Chicago Loop, to factories and impersonal glassed-in elevators. Collective action is also treated sardonically, in the gay lib parade sequences, as one more illusion or pretense to be punctured (we see a cemetery after a gay be-in). However, the mosaic technique as Sonbert (unlike Vertov) uses it does not take responsibility for direct political or social statements that can reasonably be attributed to the filmmaker. Indeed, we can assume nothing but a pileup of ironies which imply, in the worst circumstances, a shrug of indifference.

A frightening emptiness dogs these films. Perhaps their real program is spiritual [...]