Gold Diggers of 1933 was one of the top grossing films of 1933. It was the third most popular movie at the US box office that year.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound Recording for Nathan Levinson, the film's sound director.

In 2003, Gold Diggers of 1933 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

The "Pettin' in the Park" number was cut from the film when it was re-issued after the arrival of strict Production Code enforcement in 1935 and was also deleted from the first prints available for television.

Even at the time of the film's release in 1933, reviewers questioned how such a lavish stage production depicted in the film could have been put on for the $15,000 budget named in the script.

"As a new medium of musical comedy expression, the screen's latitude permits a liberal interpretation of any productioned number which no theatre stage, no matter the number of cantilever platforms, could possibly afford. The staging of the songs, with multi-scenes embellishing the lyrics, was a highlight of 42nd St. and is even more so here." - Abel., Variety, May 1933

"Miss Keeler, Mr. Powell., Mr. Kibbee and Miss Rogers are, for this type of amusement, altogether admirable, and for sheer comedy the film proper is swell stuff." - Lucius Beebe, New York Herald Tribune, May 1933

"It is an imaginatively staged, breezy show, with a story of no greater consequence than is to be found in this type of picture.... Miss MacMahon adds another fine performance to her list of Hollywood efforts. Miss Blondell is lively as the temporarily distressed Carol. Ruby Keeler does quite well as the heroine. Mr. Powell pleased the audience enormously with his singing and also his acting." - Mordaunt Hall, New York Times, May 1933

"It's a dazzling, eye-paralyzing, ear-tickling creation that makes all the other musicals look like Delaney Street peep shows. The star of the picture is the gentleman who does not appear in it [sic - he played a small bit]. Busby Berkeley, the geometrically minded lad who created the dance sequences, has done a perfectly amazing job." - Relma Morin, Los Angeles Record, May 1933

"In musicals like the Gold Diggers series, the gold diggers usually came in twos and threes, were played by smart, snappy actresses like Joan Blondell...and Aline MacMahon, [and] set out to make their way in a man's world but on their own terms.... This is one of the few genres and occasions where there's a real feeling of solidarity among women." - Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Penguin, 1975)

"The Forgotten Man production number...is at once one of the most bizarre yet eloquent evocations of the neglected 'everyman' in cinema history." - William R. Meyer, Warner Brothers Directors (Arlington House, 1978)

"All the Berkeley sequences demonstrate this unique auteur's astonishing powers to transform straightforward performative set-ups into abstract micro-worlds of consistently evolving experimental art, shooting and virtually editing in one camera with almost Hitchcockian foresight and precision. One of these numbers, 'Pettin' in the Park', adds all sorts of eroticised meaning to the notion of congress in public places." - Peter Kemp, Senses of Cinema, December 3, 2003

by Rob Nixon