Most critics take to The Heiress warmly, and the praise clusters on the acting. Olivia de Havilland’s shift from awkward, unloved daughter to something harder is singled out in nearly every review, and Ralph Richardson’s stern father draws almost as much attention; Montgomery Clift is noted more than admired. William Wyler’s direction is credited with turning a drawing-room piece into a film with real intimacy, watching a household in which kindness covers cruelty, and several reviews find the period detail working for the characters rather than against them.
The two dissenters part company over temperature rather than craft. Time Out finds the adaptation plush and painstaking but cold, and dislikes what the heroine becomes by the close. Variety, writing on release, calls it a faithful reproduction of the Victorian scene that ends up a museum piece, while still praising the cast. The spread is wide: six admiring notices against two that find the surfaces handsome and the film cold.