Upon its release, it was lambasted by some, who said it was a "vicious and unfair picture of the peasantry of France"; in France, 4,910,835 theater tickets were sold. Following its December 1952 release in the United States, Bosley Crowther called it a film with "the irony of a "Grand Illusion", the authenticity of a "Harvest" and the finesse of French films at their best"; according to Crowther, the film is a "brilliant and devastating drama of the tragic frailties of men, clear and uncorrupted by sentimentality or dogmatism in its candid view of life."