The film opened without advance screenings at the Criterion and Loew's Cine theaters in New York City and received bad reviews from the New York daily newspapers including Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" writing of a "tired symbolism" which the film was so busy pointing out "that the effect is to undercut its narrative drive and the dignity of its fiction." However, the weekly critics raved about the film including Judith Crist and Pauline Kael of "The New Yorker" who called it "a beautiful pipe dream of a movie—a fleeting, almost vision of what frontier life might have been," adding, "The movie is so affecting it leaves one rather dazed."