Rieff periodically experiences absurdist fantasy episodes or daydreams involving his own mortality, eventually delivering a soliloquy to a vast array of gravestones bringing the dead up to date on what they have missed lately.

[1] The structure of Markfield's To an Early Grave, and therefore of the movie based upon it, is to some extent a comic parallel of Joyce's novel Ulysses, specifically "Episode 6" (which is commonly known as the "Hades" chapter) where protagonist Leopold Bloom and three friends travel in a carriage to attend the funeral of Patrick "Paddy" Dignam who has died in a drunken stupor.

Zipperstein notes that Rosenfeld's premature death in failed circumstances is mentioned prominently in the memoirs of many who, like Markfield, were in the Partisan Review literary circle, including Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, and William Phillips.

"[4] Time wrote that the movie "has a lot to talk about, and nothing much to say...As the story's central character, actor Segal shows flashes of a comic talent hitherto unexplored by Hollywood.

"[5] In her New York Times review, Renata Adler described the characters as "unattractive and painful in a low-grade, humiliating way", and called the encounter with the cab driver pointless and tasteless.

"[7] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times gave a mixed review, saying the film has many funny moments but "wobbles between insight and sight-gag, between true observation and a heavy handed striving for ethnic jokes".