Elaine May's second film, according to N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby, “is a first-class American comedy... a movie that manages the marvelous and very peculiar trick of blending the mechanisms and the cruelties of Neil Simon's comedy with the sense and sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It begins as a rather familiar New York Jewish comedy about the marriage of Lenny (Charles Grodin), a wide-eyed, completely self-absorbed young man who sells sporting goods, and Lila (Jeannie Berlin), who makes the (it turns out to be) terrible mistake of saving herself for Lenny until their wedding night.... Most of their honeymoon takes place in Miami Beach where Lenny, wearing his matching swimming trunks and beach shirt, meets and falls wildly in love with a beautiful blonde WASP from Minnesota named Kelly (Cybill Shepherd)... The Heartbreak Kid is the story of Lenny's efforts to unload Lila and to pursue Kelly to Minnesota. It suggests Fitzgerald's ‘Winter Dreams' updated to 1972, but now the poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks is a New York Jew, and the unattainable Judy Jones is, ironically and perhaps tragically, all too attainable. The film succeeds in being equally merciless to the unfortunate Lila, who eats Milky Ways in her wedding bed and dribbles egg salad down her chin at breakfast, and to the magnificent-looking Kelly, whose idea of wit is the snarling retort: ‘How do you expect me to think when I'm listening?'”