The critic for "The Hollywood Reporter" was one of the few reviewers to look upon the film favorably, calling it "a Christmas sockful of joy, funny, sentimental, romantic frankly capricious." In "The New York Times", A.H. Weiler noted, "Mr. Capra and his energetic troupe manage to get a fair share of laughs from Mr. Runyon's oddball guys and dolls, but their lampoon is dated and sometimes uneven and listless . . . Repetition and a world faced by grimmer problems seem to have been excessively tough competition for this plot."