Reception
The film performed poorly at the box office, taking $200,723 across 4 screens in the USA. Channel 4 were disappointed with the returns on the film and shelved another Richardson project, Five Go To Hell.
Critics were mixed in their opinions on the film. Hal Hinson writing in The Washington Post gave it a lukewarm review, writing "The punk jaggedness they bring to their derivations is the only hint of originality, but this, too, seems a little staid. It feels like punk on the downward swing, after most of its rude energy has dissipated." However Vincent Canby in The New York Times was more favourable and drew comparisons to "an upscale John Waters satire" and "Jean-Luc Godard's pre-Maoist period."
In January 1988 the film was one of those attacked for its critique of Thatcherite society by Oxford University historian Norman Stone, which he condemned in the Sunday Times as being "worthless and insulting" and "riddled with left wing bias".
Eat The Rich featured at #49 in Time Out London's list of "Cinema's 50 greatest flops, follies and failures." The feature stated: " may not have had the budget to be considered a true flop, but the back-alley production values and total lack of comic invention on display in this Thatcher-baiting misstep meant that any hopes of a Pythonesque run at the movies were knocked way back on their heels."
Read more about this topic: Eat The Rich (film)
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)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)