The film premiered March 28, 1963, in New York City. The Museum of Modern Art hosted an invitation-only screening as part of a 50-film retrospective of Hitchcock's film work. The MoMA series had a booklet with a monograph on the director written by Peter Bogdanovich. The film was screened out of competition in May at a prestigious invitational showing at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival[52] with Hitchcock and Hedren in attendance.
As a special favor to Hedren, Hitchcock allowed her to take a copy of the film with her when she visited her hometown of Minneapolis after the film premiered in New York City. On April 1, Hedren hosted her parents and about 130 residents of Lafayette, Minnesota, where her parents lived when she was born, to an exclusive screening of the film at the local neighborhood theater Hedren frequented in her youth, The Westgate,[53] in Morningside, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, where Hedren grew up.[54] The theater was demolished in 2019.
