Even with decades and decades of hindsight, it’s not always clear which film holds up as the “best” in a given year. In 1954, for instance, we gave the Moonlight to Seven Samurai, but we could just as easily have gone with Rear Window. But usually, even if there’s not an obvious winner, we can at least narrow it down to a choice between two. Seven Samurai or Rear Window. City Lights or M. Grand Illusion or Snow White. Sunset Boulevard or Rashomon.
But every so often, a year comes along where the race is tighter still. Take 1935, when we had to choose between Bride of Frankenstein, A Night at the Opera, and The 39 Steps. Or 1946, when It’s a Wonderful Life edged out Notorious and The Best Years of Our Lives.
Now, we arrive at another one of those challenging years. 1955 features a timeless classic of Indian cinema, the crowning achievement of a young actor gone too soon, and a masterwork in suspense from a director who never made another film - and all three are about equally beloved by critics, audiences, and our expert panelists alike. How to decide?
To identify the Best Picture of 1955, 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
As we’ve already discussed, the mid-1950s is a rough patch for American cinema: the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist have wrecked the careers of numerous great filmmakers and frightened others away from the more challenging, meaningful projects they might otherwise have pursued. So we haven’t had many Hollywood nominees in the last few years.
But 1955 does produce a pair of stone-cold American classics, Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without A Cause and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter. Entertainment Weekly recently ranked Rebel as one of the 100 greatest movies ever made - and Night of the Hunter shows up on even more “best” lists, most notably Sight & Sound’s prestigious survey of international critics and directors.
Not to be outdone, the international film scene also produces two standout films. In Denmark, Carl Theodor Dreyer filmed Ordet, a masterpiece of postwar existentialism about faith and miracles in a world of materialism and doubt. Meanwhile in India, Satyajit Ray finally completed his own magnum opus, Pather Panchali, a beautiful film about children in a poor family that took several years to make. (Ordet climaxes with a single miracle that happens on screen; for Pather Panchali, Ray famously said the miracles happened off screen - particularly the fact that the two child actors didn’t hit puberty and age out of their roles before he was done filming!)
Here’s a list of 1955 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Ordet (T24), Pather Panchali (T42), Night of the Hunter (T63)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): Ordet (T19), Night of the Hunter (T26), Pather Panchali (T48)
National Society of Film Critics: Night of the Hunter, Pather Panchali, Rebel Without A Cause
BBC American (2015): Night of the Hunter (92)
BBC Foreign (2018): Pather Panchali (15), Ordet (65), Rififi (91), Floating Clouds (95)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): Rebel Without A Cause (67)
Ordet, Night of the Hunter, Pather Panchali, and Rebel Without A Cause dominate here; the only other film that gets a mention is Mikio Naruse’s Floating Clouds.
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 seventeen films from 1955:
(35) Ordet
(43) Night of the Hunter
(57) Pather Panchali
(257) Floating Clouds
(321) Kiss Me Deadly
(365) Lola Montès
(378) All That Heaven Allows
(469) French Cancan
(547) East of Eden
(587) Rebel Without A Cause
(643) Les Diaboliques
(705) Moonfleet
(711) Smiles of a Summer Night
(741) Rififi
(818) Les Maîtres Fous
(825) The Ladykillers
(851) The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
TSPDT also includes an eighteenth film, Night and Fog - but we’re classifying that one as a 1956 film, so we’ll address it later.
Once again, Ordet, Night of the Hunter, and Pather Panchali stand out, all three in the top 100, with Floating Clouds in a distant fourth. Rebel Without A Cause makes TSPDT’s list but trails well behind. (In fact it’s not even the top-ranking James Dean film of its year; that’d be East of Eden, one spot ahead.)
General Audiences
But which films from 1955 do general audiences still watch?
That’s a hard thing to measure; there’s no scientific survey that currently exists to determine how many people have seen this or that film. So we looked 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 and maler than the average person, and that can skew the numbers quite a bit.)
Here are the ten most-viewed films from 1955, according to IMDB (as of July 5, 2021):
Lady and the Tramp (126,073 votes)
Rebel Without A Cause (85,367)
Night of the Hunter (83,877)
To Catch a Thief (67,386)
Les Diaboliques (62,546)
East of Eden (41,459)
The Seven Year Itch (34,931)
The Trouble With Harry (34,634)
Rififi (30,956)
The Ladykillers (27,442)
Pather Panchali is just behind The Ladykillers in eleventh. Ordet is further back, in eighteenth place with just over 14,000 votes. (IMDB voters tend to be American, so American and English-language films will tend to get more votes. Pather Panchali’s eleventh-place ranking is rather impressive in that light: IMDB ranks Panchali as the most-viewed film of the decade not from the US, Europe, or Japan. In fact it’s the most-viewed such film of any decade, prior to 1966’s Battle of Algiers - which is half-Italian anyway.)
Disney tops the list with Lady and the Tramp, but after that we see two films that also shine with critics, Rebel Without A Cause and Night of the Hunter. Alfred Hitchcock’s in fourth with a lesser work, To Catch a Thief, followed by a Hitchcockian film that also made TSPDT’s top 1000 list, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques.
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 15 films from 1955 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.)
Pather Panchali (7) 108
Night of the Hunter (3) 106
Rebel Without A Cause (3) 103
Kiss Me Deadly (1) 88
Les Diaboliques (1) 81
Smiles of a Summer Night (1) 58
Ordet 51
Rififi 48
Floating Clouds 46
The Ladykillers 42
To Catch a Thief (1) 42
East of Eden 35
Bad Day at Black Rock 26
Marty (1) 26
Lady and the Tramp 21
All That Heaven Allows 12
The Big Combo 6
The Blackboard Jungle 6
Shree 420 1
With our panel, there’s a clear top three: Pather Panchali, Night of the Hunter, and Rebel Without A Cause are separated by just five points, and they account for the vast majority of the first-place votes. Not far behind is a film that also ranks highly with critics, Robert Aldrich’s weird Mickey Spillane adaptation Kiss Me Deadly, followed closely by Les Diaboliques, once again in fifth. (Surprisingly, our panelists didn’t much care for Ordet.)
Finally, one film did earn a couple of write-in votes: Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, which also ranks highly on TSPDT’s list. It won’t make our top five for ‘55, but we’ll encounter Sirk again very soon - next year, in fact.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Three films stand out above the rest: Night of the Hunter, Pather Panchali, and Rebel Without A Cause. Our fourth nomination goes to Les Diaboliques, which earns a spot on TSPDT’s list and makes the top five with both general audiences and our expert panel.
But which film gets our fifth nomination? Kiss Me Deadly, which is ignored by general audiences but makes the top five with critics and scholars? Lady and the Tramp, far and away the most-watched film of the year with today’s moviegoers? Rififi or The Ladykillers, both of which quietly slip into the top ten or fifteen in each of our metrics? Or Ordet, which fares poorly with moviegoers and our panelists but frequently gets hailed by critics as one of the greatest films ever made? You can argue for any of them, but we’ll go with Ordet this time; that Sight & Sound ranking is too impressive to ignore.
Our five Best Picture nominees for 1955 are:
LES DIABOLIQUES
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER ORDET PATHER PANCHALI REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
Worth noting: Night of the Hunter and Pather Panchali are the first films made by their respective directors, Charles Laughton and Satyajit Ray. This is the first time we’ve had two first-time directors earn Moonlight nods in the same year since Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione both got nominated in 1943.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
Our panelists put the kibosh on Ordet, so it’s a three-way race this year: Night of the Hunter, Pather Panchali, or Rebel Without A Cause? You could make a case for each of them, and they finished in a virtual three-way tie with our panel.
We can eliminate Rebel first, with its lower showing among critics, but that still leaves our two first-time directors, Laughton and Ray. Night of the Hunter has an edge on IMDB, but we can chalk that up to the site’s American bias; in fact considering how rarely Indian films crack into American pop culture, Panchali’s showing might even be more impressive than Hunter’s. Likewise, as the first significant Indian film to register on the world scene, Pather Panchali has almost certainly had a bigger impact on world cinema overall - and it finished first with our panel, albeit only narrowly. It’s a tough call, but we’ve got to make it one way or another.
And so: congratulations to Pather Panchali, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1955!
One interesting fact worth noting: Night of the Hunter ranks second or third in each of our top metrics (TSPDT’s top 1000, IMDB’s user votes, and our expert panel rankings). Had it won, it would have been the first film ever to win a Moonlight without ranking first in any of those three.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1956:
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
A MAN ESCAPED NIGHT AND FOG THE SEARCHERS WRITTEN ON THE WIND
As promised, we’ll get to both Night and Fog and Douglas Sirk (Written on the Wind) next year.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1955? Who should win the Moonlight for 1956? Join our community and weigh in!
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