Ultimately, George spares Stanley eternal damnation because he exceeded his quota of 100 billion souls and can afford to be generous.

[4] The title track, Moore's best known song, was performed within the movie by the fictional psychedelic rock band Drimble Wedge and the Vegetation, featuring Cook's character as the vocalist.

Writing for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called it a "pretentiously metaphorical picture" which becomes "awfully precious and monotonous and eventually ... fags out in sheer bad taste.

Ebert enthusiastically called Bedazzled's satire "barbed and contemporary ... dry and understated," and overall, a "magnificently photographed, intelligent, very funny film".

The dialogue also has an embarrassing preoccupation with the Deity and keeps making pussyfooted little dabs at blasphemy like a naughty choirboy putting out his tongue at the vicar.

The feebleness of the script would matter less if the performances were on a higher level, but the principals appear to have been given their heads and there is no sign of any control by director Stanley Donen The result, inevitably, is self-indulgent, amateurish and dull, and the one genuinely hilarious moment – three nuns on a trampoline – is repeated from an old television show.

"[10] In a retrospective review from 1989, Leslie Halliwell wrote that Bedazzled was a "camped-up version of Faust which resolves itself into a series of threadbare sketches for the stars.

[13] In the 2010s, The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 3/5 stars, writing: "From the days when London was swinging and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were a partnership made in comedy heaven, this Faustian fantasy has Dud as a cook lusting after waitress Eleanor Bron and being granted seven wishes by Pete, as a drawlingly engaging Devil hungry for Dud's soul.

[15] 20th Century Fox released an American remake by the same name, Bedazzled (2000), featuring Brendan Fraser as Elliot Richards (counterpart to Moore's role) and Elizabeth Hurley as the Devil.