Reception
At the time of release, the film was a critical and commercial success, making $25 million at the box office and receiving a range of positive reviews. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther enjoyed the film, calling it, "A gleeful, tender, and even sentimental film." Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert and ReelViews film critic James Berardinelli both praised the film, giving it four stars out of four, with Ebert adding it to his "Great Movies" list. The film has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 54 reviews.
However, there was some criticism. Due to its themes of infidelity and adultery, the film was controversial for its time. It initially received some negative reviews for its content. Film critic Hollis Alpert of the Saturday Review called it "a dirty fairy tale". According to Fred MacMurray, after the film's release he was accosted by a strange woman in the street who berated him for making a "dirty filthy movie" and hit him with her purse.
Read more about this topic: The Apartment
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)
“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)
“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)