Critical Reception
In his 1957 review, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called the film a "grandly sophisticated romance" "in the great Lubitsch tradition" and added, "Like most of Lubitsch's chefs-d'oeuvre, it is a gossamer sort of thing, so far as a literary story and a substantial moral are concerned . . . Mr. Wilder employs a distinctive style of subtle sophisticated slapstick to give the fizz to his brand of champagne . . . Both the performers are up to it — archly, cryptically, beautifully. They are even up to a sentimental ending that is full of the mellowness of afternoon."
Wilder is often mentioned as a "disciple" of Lubitsch. In his 2007 essay on the two directors for Stop Smiling magazine, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote that Love in the Afternoon was "the most obvious and explicit and also, arguably, the clunkiest of his tributes to Lubitsch, partially inspired by Lubitsch's 1938 Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (which Wilder and Brackett also helped to script, and which also starred Gary Cooper, again playing a womanizing American millionaire in France)..." John Fawell wrote in 2008 that "Lubitsch was at his most imaginative when he lingered outside of doorways, particularly when something promiscuous was going on behind the door, a habit his pupil Billy Wilder picked up. In Wilder's most Lubitsch-like film, Love in the Afternoon, we know when Gary Cooper's rich playboy has bedded another conquest when we see the group of gypsy musicians (that travels with Cooper to aid in his wooing) tiptoe out of the hotel room, shoes in hand."
In an undated and unsigned review, TV Guide notes that the film has "the winsome charm of Hepburn, the elfin puckishness of Chevalier, a literate script by Wilder and Diamond, and an airy feeling that wafted the audience along," but felt it was let down by Gary Cooper, who "was pushing 56 at the time and looking too long in the tooth to be playing opposite the gamine Hepburn . . . With little competition from the wooden Cooper, the picture is stolen by Chevalier's bravura turn."
Channel 4 thought "the film as a whole is rather let down by the implausible chemistry that is meant to develop between Cooper and Hepburn."
Read more about this topic: Love In The Afternoon (1957 Film)
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