At one point during filming, Haase had planned to visit the set but was barred by Lester, which led to the former penning a scathing account of the project's development, including the disputes over the script, for the Los Angeles Times.

[5] The production was said to be the first major studio attempt to shoot a film entirely in San Francisco, with locations that included the Filbert Steps, the Embarcadero, the Presidio, Fort Scott, Tiburon, Sausalito, and Muir Woods.

In addition to stars George C. Scott, Julie Christie, Richard Chamberlain, Shirley Knight, and Joseph Cotten, Lester included members of the comedy troupes The Committee and Ace Trucking Company.

An essential part of this manner is a form of rapid and fragmented, kaleidoscopic cross-cutting between diverse strands in a narrative tapestry, an approach that creates meaning largely through unexpected juxtapositions.

Only Ray Wagner is left, and Dick Lester and 350,000 feet of film, and miniskirts, and the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead, and the topless restaurants, and the hippies, and the junkies and the go-go girls and the mod and the pop and the op and all the other sick and ugly things of our time the book never dealt with at all.

As he told Steven Soderbergh years later: "I felt that I had plugged into what I wanted to say, and that a chance had been given me by odd circumstances: taking a book that seemed totally wrong and being angry about it, then trying to see what one could make of it and using that as a means of talking about fairly complicated things...a frazzled and disjointed response to a society that was in chaos and they didn't know how to deal with it.

"[12] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Richard Lester's choice of San Francisco – possibly both the most picturesque and gimmick-ridden of American cities – as the setting for his "sad love story" is not simply a baroque piece of window dressing.

His film is principally about people's inability to make contact with one another – whether attempting to do so from love, loneliness, hatred or compassion – and the touristic attractions of the swinging city, far from being merely decorative, are indications of the reasons for this failure ...

...Petulia's dizzying jigsaw puzzle structure combines with Nicolas Roeg's attractive photography to create its: own bright universe, leaving one with the suspicion that the destruction of love and romance is due less to contemporary social pressures than to the fashion for fragmentary narrative techniques.

"[13] Giving the film four stars, Roger Ebert wrote in his Chicago Sun-Times review of 1 July 1968: "Richard Lester's Petulia made me desperately unhappy, and yet I am unable to find a single thing wrong with it.

"[6] Mark Bourne wrote in DVD Journal that "in 1978 a Take One magazine poll of 20 film critics — including Vincent Canby, Richard Corliss, Stanley Kauffmann, Janet Maslin, Frank Rich, Andrew Sarris, Richard Schickel, David Thomson and François Truffaut — ranked Petulia among the best American films of the previous decade, taking third place after The Godfather (I and II) and Nashville, and ahead of Annie Hall, Mean Streets and 2001.

Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, and Bill Kreutzmann appear in cameos during the movie's apartment house medical emergency scene as onlookers.