Critical reception
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Hoping, no doubt, to repeat the box-office success of Tom Jones (Hugh Griffith is called back for a repeat performance as Squire Western), Richardson unhappily misses out all down the line. Firth is no Finney (leaving aside the fact that the insipid Joseph is singularly lacking in Tom's gumption); the sexual encounters are, it seems, motivated more by desperation than exuberance or, in Joseph's case, when he finally makes love to the passive girl, by an incongruously clichéd romanticism; a parade of stars walk on and off, none (like David Warner, as the odious Blifil) leaving more than a momentary impression; the episodes (elegantly linked by the narrator in Tom Jones) tumble randomly on top of each other. ... Fielding's redeeming asides are missing and even the incidental pleasures of Michael Hordern's Parson Adams, a workmanlike, worried-bloodhound performance from an accomplished character actor, cannot offset the sense of déja vu which pervades this musty enterprise." [4]
Sight and Sound wrote: "Joseph Andrews ... was a shamelessly blatant attempt at reviving past glories that reassembled many of the ingrethents behind the Oscar-winning Tom Jones (1963) a Henry Fielding source novel, John Addison score, Hugh Griffith's Rabelaisian Squire Western and some visual innuendo involving asparagus. The later film certainly has its sprightly comic moments, and British stars-potters will be in seventh heaven, but its self-conscious bawdiness becomes wearying when accompanied by little discernible satirical point. Peter Firth and Natalie Ogle are prettily blank-faced as the romantic leads, though Ann-Margret's turn as the scheming Lady Booby shows unexpected range." [5]
Variety wrote: "Joseph Andrews is a tired British period piece about leching and wenching amidst the highand lowlife of Henry Fielding's England. Tony Richardson's film is a ludicrous mix of underplayed bawdiness and sporadic vulgarity. Large cast of otherwise British players is headed by Ann-Margret, sometimes appearing grotesque in her rendition of Lady Booby, the noblewoman-with-a-past with the hots for servant Peter Firth in title role. ... Commercial outlook is thin and uneven." [6]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote: "Joseph Andrews contains more great (and more greatly funny) character performances than any film I've seen in years. It's one of the few movies around now that truly lifts the spirits, not only because it is so good-humored but also because the humor is laced with so much wit and wisdom. ...(Ann-Margret) looks great and she is enchantingly funny, but so is almost everyone else in a cast so big I really don't know where to begin, since I'm sure to leave out someone important. It's one of those films in which even the smaller roles are as beautifully and as memorably done as the larger ones. ...The film is ... an almost perfect blending of beauty, romance and adventure, of landscapes too lovely to believe alternating with the kind of gritty period detail that prompts one character (Squire Thomas) to say of a street jam in the resort city of Bath, 'The only things that move here are the bowels of the horses.'" [7]
Filmink said Ann-Margret "stole the show". [8]
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