[2] Orville Prescott of The New York Times wrote a very positive contemporary review, calling it "the best war novel yet written by an American ... Mr. Shaw is a natural writer.

[4] Jonathan Yardley, writing in 2009 in The Washington Post, identified The Young Lions as one of the four epic American war novels that emerged in the immediate post-war era.

In the film version, the character of the German soldier Christian is portrayed more sympathetically as a decent man who is deceived, rather than seduced and corrupted, by his country's Nazi rulers.

Although the novel's character is increasingly hardened by his experiences and unrepentant to the end, the film's version grows ever more disillusioned and renounces his cause in the final scenes.

As Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times in 1958 in a review of the film, the screen version is "prettier" than the novel and in the former, there is "no noticeable moral difference between the one German and two Americans".

[7] Shaw himself is said to have disliked the changes to his novel in the film version, in particular Brando's sympathetic portrayal of Christian and the playing down of the anti-Semitism that Noah encounters in the original book.