Critic Steven Harvey has written of Vittorio De Sica's third film as a director: “Its main story thread, a fable of a dewy-eyed adolescent orphan who coyly pursues and ultimately reforms an amoral playboy-physician, is of course a variation on Cinderella... The characterizations, however, are all seemingly based on contemporary American prototypes. The wistful ingenue heroine is strongly reminiscent of the American Anne Shirley, and De Sica resembles Cary Grant at his most antic. Magnani's Other Woman, a coarse and ambitious golddigger, is blood kin to Gypsy Rose Lee who struggled vainly to entice Tony Martin away from Alice Faye in all those thirties Fox musicals.”