Reception
One of the modern criticisms of the film is that Bergman, who was 33 at the time she made the movie, was nearly twice as old as the real Joan of Arc; the Swedish actress would later play her (at age 39) in a 1954 Italian film, Giovanna d'Arco al rogo (Joan at the Stake). However, reviewers in 1948 did not object to this; it was-and still is-common in for an older actress to play a teenager, as the twenty-four-year-old Jennifer Jones had in 1943's The Song of Bernadette, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar. Children were also sometimes played by older actors at the time; the sixteen year-old Judy Garland had very convincingly played twelve year-old Dorothy Gale in the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz, another film directed by Victor Fleming, and the nineteen-year-old Charlotte Henry had played Alice in Alice in Wonderland (1933).
Several critics of the time criticized the film for being slow and talky, as does contemporary critic Leonard Maltin, who has not yet reviewed the full-length version; he has said that there is "not enough spectacle to balance the talky sequences".
The film recorded a loss of $2,480,436.
Read more about this topic: Sierra Pictures
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)