Contemporary reviews
Wanda Hale of the New York Daily News gave the comedy a full four-star rating and said it "bubbles over with the vitality of youth and the fun of farce as it creates a teenage furor over a hip-twisting, leering rock 'n' roll male singer." Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times said it "should repeat the success It scored on the stage and is in the smash class with 'West Side Story' and 'The Music Man.'" A user of the Mae Tinee pseudonym in the Chicago Tribune said "the music is pleasant, the dances are spritely, and it's all amiable, light entertainment." Ken Barnard of the Detroit Free Press stated that it "offers an attractive and tuneful means of saying bye, bye to the summer doldrums for a couple of hours." Margo Miller of The Boston Globe called the film "fantasy as Hollywood can best serve up, slick and funny." Harold Whitehead of the Montreal Gazette said it was "a quite handsome film with not too many drawbacks" but noted that Ann-Margret "is much too frenetic for our taste. When she calms down a little, she will probably be really something for the musical screen." Michael P. Feiner of the Montreal Star called it "a gay musical—sometimes farcical, sometimes mildly satirical, sometimes merely entertaining, but most of the time fun to watch." A critic for the Buffalo Evening News called it a "hilarious song-and-dance show" that "exaggerates youth's exuberance and carries its infectious exhilaration to the audience." Jay Carmody of The Evening Star in Washington said that "the picture, glowing with color and crazy camera tricks, flatters its natural audience no
end. It presents the girls as beautiful, well, mostly, the boys as abounding in animal vitality, and both sexes as given to the kinds of enthusiasm that may one day really make this the best of all possible worlds. As for the elders among the performers, they come off as no more nor less Insufferable than teen-agers know them to be." He added that "the performers, and why not, have been astutely chosen by Mr. Sidney, starting with Ann-Margret (if I can leave out that second "a” in Margret, Mr. Printer, you can do it on a linotype) as the heroine. She's just fine and so are Janet Leigh and Dick Van Dyke, of the original cast, as the managers of Conrad Birdie's adieu party. Conrad himself is played by Jesse Pearson, a mad broth of a subhuman boy in a spaceman costume which he wears with all the nonworldly distinction anyone could ask."
Ann Pacey of the London Daily Herald was critical of Ann-Margret's performance in the film, but nonetheless called it "an entertaining and undemanding send-up of the kind of girlish lunacy that used to surround Elvis Presley and, in [the UK] at least, has now moved on to those four young men with the hair". Dick Richards of the Daily Mirror called it "a brash, colourful, good-humoured jest at the expense of the wild worship pop fans lavish on their favourites." A critic for The Times, also in London, was critical of the heavy plotting, which he felt "relegated" the songs "from the raison d'être of the film to something very like awkward interruptions, especially since except for 'A Lot of Living to Do' they are staged stodgily and without flair". However, he added that "there is no point in being too unkind to the film. It does contain good things, and it is generally diverting. It is even, in its picture of the popular idol (played to produce the proper ambiguity of attraction and repulsion by Jesse Pearson) and his screaming public, perhaps not too far off the mark. The only thing is that it is just good enough to make us think how much better it should have been."
The film received generally mixed-to-positive reviews in the state of Ohio itself. Brainard Platt of the Dayton Journal-Herald said it was "an excellent follow-up to the hit stage play of the same name" and a "real fun show for the whole family". E.B. Radcliffe of The Cincinnati Enquirer said the film "should be on your list of planned holiday fun" and called it a "good farce". Dale Stevens of The Cincinnati Post criticized the film for lacking the satirical edge of the musical, but said "this is unquestionably among the smash films of the year" and "should be the teenage sensation of the century". W. Ward Marsh of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that "on occasion there is too much dredged up to stimulate laughter, but for the most part the film is eminently successful. Since we’ve not had a big screen musical for some time, Bye Bye Birdie should keep the Allen's audiences—and big ones, too—laughing." Tony Mastroianni of The Cleveland Press called it "another example of Hollywood taking a fair stage show, giving it the full treatment, and making something extra special out of it."
A more mixed review of the film was offered by David Cobb of the Toronto Daily Star, who liked Ann-Margret's and Leigh's performances, its humor and the musical numbers; as for everything else, he said "it is professionally, smoothly accomplished [but not] very engaging or dramatically interesting". Richard Roud of The Guardian said, "I wonder if anyone will remember any scenes from Bye Bye Birdie (Odeon, Marble Arch) in 20 years. I doubt it. Birdie is no On the Town, no Singing in the Rain, no Funny Face. But in a year as barren of American musicals as 1963 (and 1962 for that matter) it looks pretty good [...] and it makes quite a pleasant evening out." Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised several of the musical numbers but wrote that "unfortunately, Mr. Sidney and his scriptwriter, Irving Brecher, have allowed the essence of this spirited musical comedy of Michael Stewart to get away from them. Not only do they lose Conrad Birdie in the mazes of their rearranged plot, but they lose the essential idea of satire and the pace and sparkle of the show." Les Wedman of the Vancouver Sun was more negative in his remarks, saying that the musical "as served up In the movie version, is a bit of a turkey, well-dressed but flavored with chestnuts and overdone to the point where it fell apart to reveal a pretty flimsy skeleton." Dickson Terry of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said it "starts out to be a hilarious satire on the Elvis-type rock and roll singers and their swooning teen-age audiences but somewhere along the way it loses its bearings and turns into just another musical." Stanley Eichelbaum of the San Francisco Examiner wrote that "producer Fred Kohlmar has clumsily transformed 'Bye Bye Birdie' from a clever musical satire on American teenagers into a comic-strip movie for adolescents. It's true that certain vestiges of the stage work's devastating humor and vitality have crept Into the film at the Fox Warfield and Mission Drive-In. But on the whole, director George Sidney and screenwriter Irving Brecher have bludgeoned the original into semiconsciousness. Happily, no one tried too hard to spoil the bouncy score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams. The musical numbers are the best part of the film and Onna White's choreography, which brightens most of the songs, is fresh and attractively original. And since the cast is generally young and eager—with Ann-Margret doing a surprisingly competent job as a nimble Ohio 15-year-old—the movie isn't exactly a total loss. But what it misses most is Gower Champion's sleek, galvanic direction, which kept the stage musical moving like a fine Swiss watch." Paine Knickerbocker of the San Francisco Chronicle praised the musical performances, but was critical of what he viewed as the loss of its satiric value.
James O'Neill Jr. of The Washington Daily News wrote that "two hours is simply two hours too long to tell a tired joke, but this is the length of 'Bye Bye Birdie,' at the Trans-Lux, and I was not transported by it. On the other hand, the children in the audience, who understand the attraction of rock and roll singers, and seek an idol in every guitar-playing yokel they can find, seemed to love 'Birdie,' and yelled and hollered and screamed as tho he were real. The film, as the stage musical before it, actually is supposed to be a biting comment on the musical taste of our adored teen-agers, and goes to some length to explain that most of their idols are ghastly tramps with little ability. They appeal largely to the post-puberty set for reasons better explained by a psychologist than a movie reviewer." Alexander Walker of the London Evening Standard observed that the musical "started life as a musical satire about the pop disc industry and the Presley-type idol drafted into the army and bestowing a symbolic farewell kiss on a typical teenage fan. Since then, the Beatles have replaced the Presley image, the female fan public has lowered its age from 16 to 14, and the pop-disc market has defeated satirists by outdoing anything they can do. This datedness would not matter to Bye Bye Birdie, which stars Janet Leigh, Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke, if it had five minutes of taste, wit, imagination or charm to redeem it. It hasn't."
