[1] Rudolph described the film as "an update of the classic woman's melodramas of the Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford era.

The 82-year-old Hunter was in the midst of a musical reemergence when the film was released, having left show business for 20 years after the death of her mother to become a nurse.

[5] The San Francisco Chronicle gave the film 4 out of 5 stars, praising Perkins and describing Chaplin's performance as "extraordinary" and that she "adopts a unique speech pattern as Emily.

The review also praises how Rudolph "embellishes his film with sardonic humor" and the "comically macabre touch" of TV news in the background of disasters such as an earthquake that killed one million people in Budapest.

"[7] Jack Kroll of Newsweek praised Rudolph's direction: "he has a real eye for the visual paradox, the elegant and even beautiful form in which this savagery sometimes works."