[4] In The New York Times, film critic Caryn James wrote, "It's not a good omen for 'The Innocent' that the prototypical Yank turns out to be Anthony Hopkins, the shy Englishman Leonard is played by the American Campbell Scott and the German woman who intrigues them is Isabella Rossellini...

But The Innocent, which has been on the shelf for at least a year and was dumped in theaters yesterday without advance screenings, eventually overcomes its obstacles and almost lives up to its promising pedigree.

And you can count on the director John Schlesinger (whose most famous film is Midnight Cowboy and most recent is the efficient thriller Pacific Heights) to bring it to life with a commanding sense of its increasingly complex elements.

It slipped into the Greenspring with a great cast–Anthony Hopkins, Campbell Scott and Isabella Rossellini–but without benefit of a screening, a commercial decision that seemed foolish at the time but now seems the quintessence of marketing wisdom.

It becomes a lame, bad parody of Casablanca, complete with airport, twin-engine prop plane, raincoats and Ingrid Bergman, or at least a facsimile thereof in the shape of her daughter, Rossellini.