What is the best year in movie history? The most common answer to that question is probably 1939, the year of Gone With The Wind and Wizard of Oz and Rules of the Game. But there are several other years that can stake just as strong a claim, if not stronger. I’ll take 1940 over ‘39, for starters, with The Great Dictator narrowly winning our Moonlight over such classics as Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday and Rebecca and Grapes of Wrath and Pinocchio and Fantasia.
I ask the question because we’ve arrived at 1957, a year that definitely belongs in the conversation. This year brings us not one, but two iconic Ingmar Bergman films, great works by Kurosawa and Kubrick and Fellini, and arguably the greatest courtroom drama of all time - and that’s before we even get to the film that swept the Oscars, a classic war flick that still retains its power to this day. It’s an impressive, inspiring list - but which one film best stands the test of time?
To identify the Best Picture of 1957, 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
We found nine different 1957 films that get cited on critics’ lists of the greatest films of all time. Topping the list are our two Bergman movies, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, both of which made Sight & Sound’s prestigious 2012 ranking of the top 100 films ever made. Seventh Seal in particular frequently shows up on these critics’ lists: it even made Entertainment Weekly’s more populist top-100 ranking, which is pretty remarkable for a dour existentialist Swedish black-and-white film about a plague-ridden crusader playing chess with death.
Looking past Bergman, we also have our courtroom drama, 12 Angry Men, and our Oscar winner, David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai - both of which are cited on multiple lists, including the AFI’s ranking of the best American films ever made. (Though whether Bridge is an “American” film is up for debate.) We also found multiple citations for Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria - arguably Giulietta Masina’s crowning performance, hard as it is to top La Strada.
Here’s a list of 1957 films that show up in critics’ all-time “best” lists, and where they rank:
Sight & Sound critics (2012): Wild Strawberries (T63), The Seventh Seal (T93)
Sight & Sound directors (2012): The Seventh Seal (T75)
AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” (2007): Bridge On The River Kwai (36), 12 Angry Men (87)
Empire’s “100 Greatest Movies” (2017): 12 Angry Men (40)
Leonard Maltin: Paths of Glory, The Seventh Seal
National Society of Film Critics: Jailhouse Rock, The Seventh Seal, Nights of Cabiria
The Hollywood Reporter (2014): Bridge On The River Kwai (75), 12 Angry Men (78)
BBC Foreign (2018): The Seventh Seal (30), Nights of Cabiria (87), Wild Strawberries (89)
Entertainment Weekly (2013): The Seventh Seal (58), A Face in the Crowd (93), Sweet Smell of Success (100)
Five films get multiple citations, but that’s just the beginning: we also found citations for Stanley Kubrick’s early masterpiece Paths of Glory, biting journalism satires A Face in the Crowd and Sweet Smell of Success - and surprisingly, the Elvis Presley vehicle Jailhouse Rock. It was a crowded year.
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 fifteen films from 1957:
(61) Wild Strawberries
(73) The Seventh Seal
(195) Nights of Cabiria
(215) Sweet Smell of Success
(228) Paths of Glory
(280) Throne of Blood
(413) Bridge on the River Kwai
(420) An Affair to Remember
(442) The Cranes Are Flying
(476) Pyaasa
(519) Twelve Angry Men
(724) Night of the Demon
(776) Il Grido
(882) Mother India
(939) The Incredible Shrinking Man
Bergman tops the list twice over with Wild Strawberries and Seventh Seal, but there are several great films just behind - including Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s take on Macbeth.
General Audiences
But which films from 1957 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 1957, according to IMDB (as of August 18, 2021):
12 Angry Men (724,204 votes)
Bridge on the River Kwai (210,190)
Paths of Glory (185,960)
The Seventh Seal (174,131)
Witness for the Prosecution (115,075)
Wild Strawberries (101,288)
Throne of Blood (49,289)
Nights of Cabiria (45,426)
Plan 9 From Outer Space (37,391)
Sweet Smell of Success (29,862)
Special props to Plan 9 From Outer Space, which has parlayed its “worst movie ever” reputation into enduring (and, let’s be honest, well-deserved!) popularity.
Six 1957 films continue to resonate heavily with today’s moviegoers - most notably 12 Angry Men, which (according to IMDB, at least) is far and away the most-watched film of the decade. (The second-most watched film of the ‘50s is 1954’s Rear Window, with 462,000 votes.) In fact 12 Angry Men is not only the most-watched film of the 1950s - it’s also the most-watched film of any year prior to 1971. (A Clockwork Orange gets slightly more votes.)
Trailing 12 Angry Men are two war films, Bridge on the River Kwai and Paths of Glory. But it’s Ingmar Bergman, again, whose lasting legacy may be the most impressive. Neither Seventh Seal nor Wild Strawberries are in any way designed to appeal to popular audiences, either in their own time or today - and yet both films rank among the thirty most-viewed films of the entire decade, ahead of universally recognized (and more populist) classics like High Noon, The Searchers, and The Day The Earth Stood Still.
The sixth film with widespread popular appeal is Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, a great whodunit with an Agatha Christie script and a killer late-career performance from Marlene Dietrich. Ingmar Bergman had a year for the ages, but Billy Wilder’s 1957 wasn’t bad: not only did he make Witness, he also released the Gary Cooper-Audrey Hepburn comedy Love in the Afternoon, which made IMDB’s top 20 for the year as well.
So that’s where general audiences stand.
But what do film scholars think?
Scholarly Acclaim
We gave our panel of scholars a list of 17 films from 1957 and asked them to rank their favorites. (We also encouraged write-in votes, if there were any films they thought we’d missed.) Typically we try to keep the list to no more than fifteen films in a given year - but there were just too many this time around. (Even so, we still left out films like Love in the Afternoon, Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon - and, sadly, Plan 9, which is one of the three ‘57 films I still own on DVD.)
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.)
Nights of Cabiria (3) 84
The Seventh Seal (3) 84
Sweet Smell of Success (3) 81
Wild Strawberries (1) 76
Throne of Blood (3) 68
Bridge on the River Kwai (2) 66
12 Angry Men 64
Paths of Glory 60
A Face in the Crowd 50
Funny Face (1) 50
The Cranes Are Flying 49
Mother India (1) 30
Jailhouse Rock 29
An Affair To Remember (1) 23
Gunfight at the OK Corral 18
The Incredible Shrinking Man 16
Witness For The Prosecution 13
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? 9
Forty Guns 7
The Tarnished Angels 4
Sayonara 3
Il Grido 2
Hell Drivers 1
No surprise for a year this packed, but there is no consensus at all among our scholars. Nine films got first-place votes, tying the record previously set by 1938 and 1953. Even more notably, for the first time ever, no film got more than three first-place votes. In fact we’ve only had four previous years where no film got more than five first-place votes - and only one previous year where no film got more than four. (That year was 1940, another “best year ever” contender.)
Also for the first time ever, we have a first-place tie, with Seventh Seal and Nights of Cabiria each drawing the same point total and the same number of first-place votes. Just behind in third is Sweet Smell of Success, followed by Wild Strawberries in fourth - and then it’s a very tight pack of four great films after that.
Our panelists don’t have a clear favorite this year, but they can help us eliminate some contenders - like A Face in the Crowd, Mother India, and Witness for the Prosecution, all great films that get crowded out in the midst of a very impressive field.
Choosing Five Nominees
With all that in mind, what are our five Best Picture nominees?
Our panelists make it easy to narrow the field down to eight strong contenders: Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Nights of Cabiria, Sweet Smell of Success, Paths of Glory, Throne of Blood, 12 Angry Men, and Bridge on the River Kwai. Those are the top eight films with our panel; they’re all among the top 10 with general audiences; seven of the eight appear on critics’ all-time “best” lists (Throne of Blood the only exception); and they all make TSPDT’s top 1000 list as well. (In fact TSPDT’s top seven films are all included on that list of eight: 12 Angry Men is the only one that trails a bit further back.) There are many great films from 1957, but when all is said and done, there’s actually a strong consensus that those are the top eight of the year.
But we have to narrow it down to five, and that’s where it gets tricky.
First, we can make it a little easier by limiting ourselves to one Bergman film. Seventh Seal has a slight edge over Wild Strawberries, so we’ll let that one stand in for both.
Our second nomination goes to 12 Angry Men: it’s seventh with our panel and eighth with TSPDT, but its enduring popularity with general audiences makes it impossible to deny.
Next, we’ll nominate the other two movies that resonate strongly with general audiences: our two war films, Paths of Glory and Bridge on the River Kwai.
That leaves one more nomination and three films that could claim it: Nights of Cabiria, Sweet Smell of Success, and Throne of Blood. Of the three, Nights of Cabiria has the strongest claim: it leads the other two with critics, it’s tied for first with our panelists, and with general audiences it’s ahead of Sweet Smell and only very slightly behind Throne.
Thus, our five Best Picture nominees for 1957 are:
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI
NIGHTS OF CABIRIA
PATHS OF GLORY
THE SEVENTH SEAL
TWELVE ANGRY MEN
But 1957 has some of the best honorable mentions we’ve seen yet: Throne of Blood and Sweet Smell of Success would be shoo-in nominees in most other years, and we’re only leaving Wild Strawberries out on a technicality.
Which film would miss the cut if we let Wild Strawberries in? Nights of Cabiria resonates the least with general audiences, but it’s hard to deny that first-place finish with our panelists - so Paths of Glory might have been the one to get the boot. We’ll never know.
And The Winner Is…
So after all that, who wins?
It’s a close race this year, but we can actually make this easy. The Seventh Seal is tied for first with our scholars, it’s first with critics (among our five nominees, at least), and it’s one of the four films that still appeal strongly to general audiences today. Plus, as we’ve established, Seventh Seal is standing in for Wild Strawberries as well - allowing us to honor both films at once, and recognize Ingmar Bergman for his incredible year.
And so: congratulations to The Seventh Seal, the Moonlight Award winner for Best Picture of 1957!
Is Bergman’s 1957 the best year ever for a director? There are only a few other contenders. Among the most obvious challengers: Leo McCarey released The Awful Truth and Make Way For Tomorrow in 1937; Preston Sturges directed Sullivan’s Travels and The Lady Eve in 1941; Francis Ford Coppola made The Conversation and The Godfather Part II in 1974; and Steven Spielberg dropped Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in 1993. Maybe the top contender is Victor Fleming, credited with directing Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz in 1939 - though of course Fleming had a lot of help on both of those films.
Moving on, here are our nominees for Best Picture of 1958:
ASHES AND DIAMONDS
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS
MON ONCLE
TOUCH OF EVIL
VERTIGO
Jacques Tati gets his first nomination for Mon Oncle after just missing out in 1953 with Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. Orson Welles gets his first nomination in 11 years for Touch of Evil - and possibly his last, unless Chimes of Midnight makes a run in ‘65. Maybe the splashiest return, though, is Alfred Hitchock, who gets his first nomination since 1954; that four-year gap is Hitch’s longest, going all the way back to his first nomination in 1935. Vertigo is the 10th Hitchcock film to be nominated; no other director has more than four.
What do you think? Did we get it right for 1957? Who should win the Moonlight for 1958? Join our community and weigh in!
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