According to Columbia's Harry Cohn, The Matinee Idol, a burlesque of the theater centering on the tribulations of a hammy tent company putting on a Civil War drama, “started the audience laughing in the first fifty feet and never allowed them to stop except for little impressive human touches injected here and there which never failed to register.” The Variety reviewer, Sid Silverman, gave resounding approval to what he called a “solid laugh and hoke picture. . . . It's a picture a good organist can have a circus with. The chest-heaving and gesturing drama lays itself open to all kinds of kidding sobs.” Columbia was starting to spend more money on Capra's films, and that helped elevate The Matinee Idol in status to a movie that Variety said could play on its own without a second feature. Rediscovered by the Cinémathèque Française in 1992 and restored by Columbia in 1997, The Matinee Idol drolly reflects Capra's experience of amateurish theatrics at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, in the Civil War play The Crisis.