Reception
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave the film a mixed review. He admired one performance, writing, "... von Stroheim has all other movie Huns backed completely off the screen" and " ... whenever he appears in this picture, ..., he gives you the creeps and the shivers. Boy, what a nasty Hun!" However, he was less than impressed with the rest, complaining, "As though this fanciful story weren't sufficiently hard to take, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, a couple of old-hand Paramount wags, have dressed it up with shenanigans which have the flavor of fun in a haunted house." "It has a little something for all tastes, provided you don't give a darn." The Variety magazine response was more generous, calling it "a dynamic, moving vehicle" and praising Wilder's handling of "the varied story elements, countless suspenseful moments and vivid portrayals in excellent fashion." Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader agreed, characterizing the film as a "crisp spy thriller" and, as Wilder's second stint at directing, "Excellent apprentice work, with many Wilder themes seething beneath the surface."
Read more about this topic: Five Graves To Cairo
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“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)
“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)