Critical
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "The film is very much a straight adaptation of the play, the house rounded out into several rooms, the camera generally keeping a respectful distance and not trying anything too tricky. This lack of imaginative camerawork highlights the staginess of the performances by robbing much of the action of any real atmosphere. ... The most powerful performance comes from Joan Plowright as Masha, perhaps because her character, full of petulance and temper, can more naturally stand apart from the rest of the household and dictate its own terms without seeming mannered or posed. When Irina learns of Tusenbach's death and the sisters realise they are still to remain together at home, Masha runs to comfort her sister with a slight smile on her lips. It is a very good moment, one of the few in the film when a character seems lit up from within. Otherwise, while the film coheres, it does so without any real inspiration." [5]
Charles Champlin wrote in the Los Angeles Times : "There is, of course, no reason why a photographed stage play should pretend to be anything else. The play and the acting are what matter, and let us see and hear them with a minimum of distraction. Except that the conventions of the one medium are not those of the other, and a disbelief willingly suspended in the presence of living actors cannot quite so easily be suspended before flickering projections, On the whole this Three Sisters becomes an item of record, invaluable ...but ultimately after the fact and quite lifeless. Olivier's film does not even accommodate to the differing presumptions of the camera to the extent of putting ceilings on the sets. The flats stretch up to the flies and in a paradoxical way the confining sense of proscenium is lost. The claustrophobic force which Chekhov ought to have on staging is dissipated into the upper darkness, so that the production disappoints doubly, both as filmed theater and as cinema." [6]
Variety wrote: "Pic, which boasts the very satisfying translation by Moura Budberg, is ... not quite a direct record of the play, nor is it quite a complete reinterpretation or reconception of the legit staging. In between the two extremes, it moves around strikingly attracive sets by Josef Svoboda, lovngly photographed by Geoffrey Unsworth, with only a few filmic diversions, i.e., a flash forward to the duel between Tuseénbach and Solloni, another to visualize the sisters' longing for a distant Moscow". [7]
Boxoffice wrote: "Regular subscribers of the [American Film Theatre's] first season should find this absorbing fare and applaud the decision to release the only production not made especially for the series. Sheila Reid as the brother's wife has the most radical character change, from backward peasant girl to shrewish mistress of the manor; those who wait for her comeuppance at the hands of outspoken sister Plowright will be disappointed." [8]
Critic Judith Crist wrote, "Once again we are faced with a neither-film-nor-play production, but it is, in Moura Budberg's liberal but satisfying translation and under Olivier's semi-cinematic direction, one at very least to fascinate devotees of the play. ... Through several performances, in Geoffrey Unsworth's luscious cinematography (and I mean the adjective in praise of the uncluttered and naturally generated flow his work deserves), and in the pacing there is somehow a sensuality and a sexuality underlying the work that I had not hitherto felt." [9]
Molly Haskell wrote that the film "boasts in Joan Plowright's Masha the finest performance I have seen or ever hope to see of one of Chekhov's greatest women characters." [10]
