The Fortune Cookie is almost the only recent American comedy that's about some recognizable contemporary menaces—insurance frauds, shyster lawyers, prying detectives, the American eagerness to confuse money and love. It also is in black and white and actually looks cheap, though it aims at big commercial success. This would be about enough to make it a movie worth seeing, but it also has some good writing and two shrewd performances…. Billy Wilder's satires, like The Apartment, usually look more cynical than they are; in this one the main problem is that [Willie], though his lines are indeed sour, is simply too much fun to watch, too charming a caricature to have much edge.

Stephen Farber, "Entertainments: 'The Fortune Cookie'," in Film Quarterly (copyright 1967 by The Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of the University of California Press), Vol. XX, No. 3, Spring, 1967, p. 61.