We started this project in 1930, so we’ve now covered more than 40 years of movie history - and one thing’s for sure: some years are easier than others. Sometimes it’s still not clear, even with decades of hindsight, which film has emerged as the best picture from a given year - and then there are other years where there’s an obvious right answer and everybody knows it.
1972 is in that second category. Love it or hate it, The Godfather is chiseled into cinema’s Mount Rushmore, so there’s no sense dragging out any suspense about who’s going to win this time around. But which film comes in second? Cabaret took home most of the Oscars and still holds up as a beloved musical; Marlon Brando’s comeback also included an iconic turn in Last Tango in Paris; and this year also gave us the unforgettably crazy-ass performances of Klaus Kinski in Aguirre the Wrath of God and Divine in Pink Flamingos. The Corleones will rule, but they won’t stand alone.
To identify the Best Picture of 1972, we looked at critical rankings and general audience votes - and then we conducted a survey of renowned film scholars. Here’s what we found!
Critics’ Lists
For this project, we looked at thirteen well-known lists ranking the “best” films of all time - and no surprise, The Godfather shows up on every single one. (Well, almost: it didn’t make the BBC’s list of the 100 best foreign-language films. Though with all that Italian, who would have argued if it had?)
Not only does The Godfather show up on every list, it shows up near the top: five of our critics’ lists rank The Godfather as the number-one or number-two film of all time. The only naysayers are those notoriously art-housey critics from Sight & Sound, who put The Godfather all the way down in…21st. You insult me, on the day of my daughter’s wedding.
And if anything, The Godfather’s reputation is only growing stronger. That 21st-place finish is from the 2012 Sight & Sound poll; in the updated 2022 edition, The Godfather moved up to 12th.
Here’s a list of 1972 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Godfather (T21), Aguirre the Wrath of God (T90)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Godfather (T7), Aguirre the Wrath of God (T59)
Sight & Sound critics (2022): Godfather (12)
Sight & Sound directors (2022): Godfather (3)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Godfather (2), Cabaret (63)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): Godfather (1)
Harris poll (2014): Godfather (4)
Leonard Maltin: Godfather
National Society of Film Critics: Godfather
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Godfather (1)
BBC American (2015): Godfather (2), Deliverance (84)
BBC Foreign (2018): Aguirre the Wrath of God (17), Solaris (57), Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (84)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Godfather (2), Last Tango in Paris (65), Cabaret (73)
Behind The Godfather, the 1972 film that gets the most critical love is Werner Herzog’s jawdropping masterpiece Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which made Sight & Sound’s top 100 in 2012 (though not 2022) and got cited by the BBC as one of the 20 greatest foreign-language films ever made. (The BBC critics liked 1972, also citing Deliverance, Solaris, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.) And coming in near the end of the golden age for Hollywood musicals, Cabaret also earns acclaim with spots on several “all-time best” lists.
Most of those “all-time best” lists only rank the top 100 movies, though. The website They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? goes further and ranks the top thousand films of all time, according to critical acclaim. TSPDT’s list includes twelve films from 1972:
(7) The Godfather
(102) Aguirre, the Wrath of God
(150) Cries and Whispers
(165) Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(190) Solaris
(342) Cabaret
(371) Last Tango in Paris
(567) The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
(572) Deliverance
(617) Roma
(629) Fat City
(899) Pink Flamingos
There’s The Godfather leading the way again, naturally, with Aguirre well behind but clearly in second. Behind Aguirre is a trio of European classics: Ingmar Bergman’s austere Cries and Whispers, Luis Buñuel’s surreal satire The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie - and Andrei Tarkovsky’s pondering sci-fi Solaris, which I will refrain from describing as “2001-esque” only because Tarkovsky weirdly hated 2001. (All the main characters are haunted by ghosts: should I use the phrase “phantom menace” instead?)
Those are TSPDT’s top five, but there are quite a few noteworthy flicks behind them. We’ve already mentioned Cabaret and Last Tango in Paris, which check in at sixth and seventh here - in Last Tango’s case, despite its increasingly toxic reputation for behind-the-scenes nastiness. There’s also a strong showing for Deliverance, cited by the BBC as one of the greatest American movies. And we get our first looks at two of the most iconic queer filmmakers of all time: Rainer Werner Fassbinder in The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, and John Waters in the divine Pink Flamingos.
General Audiences
But which films from 1972 do general audiences still watch?
There’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film, so we look at user rankings on IMDB.com: generally speaking, the more rankings a film gets, the more people are likely to have seen it. You do have to take IMDB data with a grain of salt: among other things, IMDB users tend to be younger than average and more likely male, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit. (Films with male protagonists tend to get more votes, for one thing.) Also, IMDB is an American website, so we’ve noted a clear bias toward English-language films: most IMDB users are English speakers, so naturally they’ll tend to gravitate toward movies in their own language.
Having said all that, here are the ten most-viewed films from 1972, according to IMDB (as of February 3, 2023):
The Godfather (1,870,922 votes)
Deliverance (111,783)
Solaris (92,986)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (58,259)
Cabaret (56,250)
Last Tango in Paris (55,007)
Sleuth (48,343)
Frenzy (46,729)
The Poseidon Adventure (46,462)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (44,020)
According to IMDB, The Godfather is the most-watched film of the entire decade, beating even Star Wars. And it’s the ninth-most watched film of all time, which is remarkable given IMDB’s extreme recency bias: newer films tend to get far more votes, so a 50-year-old movie making the top ten is a high achievement indeed. (Only three pre-1990 films make IMDB’s top 30: the other two are Star Wars…and The Godfather Part II.)
But we already know that about The Godfather. More interesting: who’s in second? According to IMDB, it’s Deliverance, with a narrow lead over Solaris. But given IMDB’s English-language bias, Solaris really has the more impressive showing here. There are only two foreign-language films from the entire decade with more votes than Solaris: Dario Argento’s Suspiria and another Tarkovsky flick, Stalker. (The English/Chinese hybrid Enter the Dragon gets more votes too, if you want to count it.)
Also putting up a strong showing is another foreign-language film: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in fourth place ahead of Cabaret and Last Tango. A little further back, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie also sneaks into the top ten - just behind our old friend Alfred Hitchcock, in eighth place with Frenzy.
And in case you’re wondering: Pink Flamingos is all the way back in 21st place, with just over 25,000 votes. Come on, IMDB folks.
Scholarly Acclaim
So that’s where general audiences stand. How about film scholars?
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 14 films from 1972 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.)
We used a ranked-choice system to tally the votes: 10 points for their top-ranked film, 9 points for their #2 choice, and so on down.
Here are the results, with the number of first-place votes in parentheses. (Write-in votes are in italics.)
The Godfather (13) 203
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (5) 144
Cries & Whispers (1) 104
Cabaret (1) 101
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (2) 99
Solaris 91
Deliverance 83
The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1) 66
Last Tango in Paris 63
Pink Flamingos (1) 54
Frenzy 33
Roma 32
The Candidate 28
Chloe in the Afternoon 15
Sleuth 13
Fat City 12
Last House on the Left 11
The King of Marvin Gardens 8
The Seduction of Mimi 8
Super Fly 8
Sounder 6
Sambizanga 5
The Getaway 4
Play It Again, Sam 4
The Ruling Class 4
The Harder They Come 3
What's Up, Doc? 3
A few notes on The Godfather. First, its total of 203 points is the second-highest we’ve ever seen, behind only 2001: A Space Odyssey, which tallied 221 points in 1968. Second, its 13 first-place votes ties it with 1931’s M for fifth all-time: 2001 also leads there with 17 first-place votes, followed by Modern Times, Citizen Kane, and The Conformist with 14 each. And it becomes just the twelfth film ever to sweep all three of our metrics for its year, finishing first with our panelists, with IMDB voters, and on TSPDT’s critical aggregate. Stanley Kubrick achieved that feat multiple times recently with Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange - but The Godfather is the first non-Kubrick film to complete the trifecta since 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain.
But we’re more interested in second place this year - and there Aguirre reigns supreme, with five first-place votes and a 40-point lead on Cries & Whispers, Cabaret, and Discreet Charm, which are locked in a virtual tie for third.
Further down, it’s worth noting the write-in support for The Candidate, the Robert Redford-starring political comedy that won an Oscar for its screenplay. It doesn’t score with critics or today’s general audiences, but it picked up 28 points from our panel - making it the most popular write-in choice of the entire decade.
Oh, and just one more thing: if you’re not a fan of The Godfather, rest assured you’re not alone. One of our panelists, a film scholar at an Ivy League university who’s published numerous acclaimed books and articles on cinema history, did not put The Godfather in their top ten at all.
Choosing Five Nominees
So with all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Or, more to the point: what are our four other Best Picture nominees, after The Godfather?
Aguirre, the Wrath of God is the first clear lock: aside from The Godfather, it leads with critics as well as our panelists, and it also ranks as one of the most popular films of the year with general audiences, despite the English-language bias of our IMDB metric. Solaris also deserves a nod for the same reason: it’s slightly behind Aguirre with critics and scholars, but its strong showing with general audiences gives it an extra boost.
That leaves two remaining spots and five possible contenders: Cabaret, Cries & Whispers, Deliverance, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and Last Tango in Paris. We can knock out Last Tango first; it scores the lowest with our panel and doesn’t stand out anywhere else. (We can also rule out Pink Flamingos and Petra Von Kant by extension, since Last Tango either leads or is tied with those two on every metric.) Deliverance is the next to go: of the four remaining candidates, it has the edge with general audiences but trails well behind with critics and scholars.
That leaves Cabaret, Cries & Whispers, and Discreet Charm, all of which are virtually tied with our panel. No right or wrong answers here - but we’ll leave out Cries & Whispers, which was the only one of the three not to be cited on a critical “best” list and also trails the other two with general audiences.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1972 are:
AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD
CABARET
THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE
THE GODFATHER SOLARIS
Remarkably, Ingmar Bergman still only has two Moonlight nominations - but he’s won both times, for The Seventh Seal in 1957 and Persona in 1966, so he ain’t hurting. (His characters are, but he’s not.)
Also worth noting: this period in film history is dominated by the New Hollywood movement, but three of our five nominees this year are European. To put that into perspective, we only had three non-American nominees in the last three years combined - and two of those three, Death in Venice and Kes, were filmed in English. (Or at least Death in Venice was; I’m still not sure what language they were speaking in Kes.) The pendulum swung the other way in 1972, and that’s not just true of our five nominees: some of the closest also-rans were European too, including Cries & Whispers and Petra Von Kant.
Finally, a sort-of congratulations to the great Luis Buñuel, who scores his fifth nomination with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Buñuel got one of our very first nominations all the way back in 1930 for L’Age d’Or, and he’s been going strong ever since, also earning nods for 1950’s Los Olvidados, 1961’s Viridiana, and 1967’s Belle de Jour. With five nominations, Buñuel is tied with Orson Welles for second-most all-time, behind only the thirteen racked up by the insurmountable Alfred Hitchcock. Sadly, though, Buñuel keeps coming up short when it comes to actually winning a Moonlight: he’ll be 0-for-5 after this year, making him the only director with more than three Moonlight nominations but zero wins. (Which directors are 0-for-3? Robert Bresson, Vincente Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, Alain Resnais, Luchino Visconti, Robert Wise, William Wyler - and Carl Theodor Dreyer, though he would likely have a win for 1928’s The Passion of Joan of Arc if we’d gone back that far.)
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
I mean, we knew this one going in: congratulations to The Godfather, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1972!
Incredibly, in this entire piece, I haven’t mentioned the name Francis Ford Coppola yet! But we’re going to be hearing that name a lot in the very near future: he’ll be back in 1974 with Godfather II and The Conversation, one of the most impressive years ever for a director, and then again in 1979 with the very Aguirre-like Apocalypse Now. We’ve talked a lot about Stanley Kubrick’s incredible run, with three straight landslide Moonlight wins for Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange - but Coppola may be about to match that in the next seven years.
But to return to the question we opened with: sure, sure, we know The Godfather is this year’s winner, but who’s second? Turns out, it’s not close there either: Aguirre, the Wrath of God is the clear winner with critics and the clear winner with our expert panel, and it overcomes IMDB’s English-language bias to score as one of the most popular films with general audiences too. So Aguirre takes the silver - though that’s got to be a little grating for Aguirre himself, who was really, really, really, really, REALLY, REALLY looking for gold.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1973:
AMERICAN GRAFFITI
BADLANDS
DON’T LOOK NOW THE EXORCIST MEAN STREETS
1972 must have just been an aberration, because we’re right back to Hollywood here. First-time nominations here for George Lucas (American Graffiti), Terrence Malick (Badlands), and Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets) - as well as Nicolas Roeg, who just missed out on a nomination for Performance in 1970 but gets one here for Don’t Look Now, our second death-in-Venice flick already this decade.
Though four of our nominees are American (and the fifth, Don't Look Now, is British), 1973 was also a good year for cinema worldwide. Among the films that just missed our cut are La Maman et la Putain, Spirit of the Beehive, and Touki Bouki (French, Spanish, and Senegalese, respectively), which all made Sight & Sound’s top-100 list last year - not to mention Fellini’s Amarcord, which made the S&S list back in 2012.
And 1973 is also a good year for horror, as Don’t Look Now and The Exorcist join Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead as Moonlight nominees from this early generation of horror masterpieces. And we’re probably not done: Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, Suspiria, Halloween, and Alien are just around the corner, not to mention horror-adjacent classics like Jaws and Eraserhead. (And Young Frankenstein too, for that matter.)
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1972? Who should win the Moonlight for 1973? Join our community and weigh in!
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