In May 1964 Walter Reade-Sterling released a 126-minute version of the film; according to Bosley Crowther, that version is a "simple social drama turns out to be engrossingly human, compassionate and humorous...Marcello Mastroianni ... plays the title role with a delightful blend of ardor, ingenuousness and whimsicality. He excels as the shaggy-haired, near-sighted, idealistic intellectual who leads a handful of downtrodden workers ... in a revolt. But the whole thing is done with such veracity and the other roles are so strongly played or, at least, so graphically represented—that one feels right in the middle of one of those classic demonstrations in which the labor movement was born."