The film featured in competition at the 19th Venice International Film Festival and divided critics between those who thought it a masterpiece and those who thought it poor. The film won three Mainichi Film Awards, including Best Film; it was submitted as the Japanese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 31st Academy Awards, but was not chosen as one of the five nominees. In a June 1961 review in The New York Times, A.H. Weiler called the film "an odd and colorful evocation of Japan's past that is only occasionally striking"; "It is stylized and occasionally graphic fare in the manner of the Kabuki Theatre, which is realistically staged, but decidedly strange to Western tastes." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film a maximum 4 stars, and added it to his Great Movies list in 2013, making it the final film he added to the list before his death.
Restoration
During the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, a digitally restored version of the film was screened out of competition, as part of the festival's Cannes Classics selections. In a 2013 review of The Criterion Collection release of the Blu-ray Disc version of the restored film, Slant Magazine's Jordan Cronk said Kinoshita, a "less celebrated" practitioner in the jidaigeki genre,
"takes one of Japan's most chronicled cultural tools, Kabuki theater, as a stylistic blueprint to interpret both a work of literary renown and a legend of ancestral import. And yet for all its solemn reverence, it's one of the era's most radical experiments. Shot exclusively on soundstages, save for one brief final scene, the film consolidates two distinct mediums, theater and cinema, into an analysis of both aesthetic functionality and affinity. By not masking his chosen conceptual conceit, Kinoshita is free to explore the formulations and possibilities of both modes of presentation.
Cronk concludes "Kinoshita respects the source material and conventions of the culture he's depicting so much,...that the film plays more like a cinematic elegy than cosmetic theater. When the film cuts in its final scene to actual location footage, it isn't jarring so much as relieving, a chance to exhale after an exhausting journey."
